Jean-Marc Bustamante

Some recent solo exhibitions
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris 2008, 'La chambre des saintes'
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels 2008, 'Le Grand Tour – bozar'
Musée des arts contemporains du Grand Hornu 2008, 'Le Grand Tour'
Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg 2007, 'L'horizon chimérique' (with Ed Ruscha)Kunsthaus Bregenz 2007, 'Beautiful Days'

Selected publications
Jean-Pierre Criqui, Céline Flécheux, L'horizon chimérique, Ed Ruscha – Jean-Marc Bustamante, Strasbourg: Musée d'art moderne et contemporain 2008
Christine Montalbetti, Eckhard Schneider, Jean-Marc Bustamante: Beautiful Days, Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz 2006
Jacinto Lageira [et al.], Jean-Marc Bustamante, Paris: Flammarion 2005

Selected public and corporate collections
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, NL • Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, NL • SMAK, Ghent, BE • Kunsthaus Zürich, CH • Tate Modern, London, UK • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US

Jean-Marc Bustamante is working his way into the relationships between things: between photography and painting, abstraction and representation, certain free/random forms and other more constructed forms, the finished and the irregular, transparentness and opaqueness, construction and appropriation. He turned at a very early stage to photography. Between 1983 and 1987, keen to explore the links between object and image, he produced objects and installations with the visual artist Bernard Bazile, under the name Bazile Bustamante. In 1988 he reverted to working on his own, mainly through sculpture. In the Lumières (1988-1991), photos dating mainly from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, discovered by Bustamante in books and art and architectural magazines, were re-photographed and printed as silkscreened enlargements on transparent plexiglas to give them another status. With his Panoramas, which he started to create in the late 1990s, he returned to painting through the process of silkscreening a previously enlarged image on plexiglas, but this time based on very impulsive, intimate, hot drawings. The Trophées series, started in 2005, is a veritable work of strata; each sheet of monochrome plexiglas. The drawing is cut out and fixed in the metal by blowtorch, keeping exactly the quivering of the line. To-and-fro movements occur between the geometric and the organic. Jean-Marc Bustamante was chosen to represent France at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).

Jean-Marc Bustamante is a former advisor at the Rijksakademie.