Jean-Marc Bustamante Dead Calm
Exhibition 4 February – 3 April 2011
Jean-Marc Bustamante is one of France’s senior artists and a major figure in the international art world. He has exhibited in major institutions all over the world, and presented work in numerous biennials and festivals, including representing France in the Venice Biennale in 2003.
His clear, direct vision manifests itself in an almost bewildering array of materials and media. Over the past three decades, he has moved from working primarily in photography to sculpture, to installation and architectural projects, and finally to painting. His work is unified and characterised by its calm intelligence and a kind of extraordinary ordinariness that helps us see its subject, the world around us, in a new way. In all his work he takes risks, questioning the characteristics of each medium and testing its limits, its capacity for capturing in visual form an impression of a moment in time, an experience or feeling.
This exhibition, Bustamante’s first in Scotland, includes classic work from the 1980s and 90s – the large-scale photographs and sculptures with which Bustamante made his name – and newer work from 2000, in particular a series of paintings on Perspex made especially for The Fruitmarket Gallery and completed in 2010. The selection responded to the spaces and structure of the building: at ground level, the work related to the ground itself, the earth, holes in the earth and the human occupation of nature; upstairs, the work responded to the sky, daylight and changing light levels. In his earlier work downstairs, the origins of Bustamante’s innovative and experimental practice that continues today can be seen.
Bustamante’s art has not been seen enough in Britain, and we are delighted to bring it to new audiences in Scotland. This exhibition presented our audience with the opportunity to track the development and continued reinvention of Bustamante’s ideas and artistic language. Though sitting outside recognizable trends in recent art, Bustamante’s work has a formal and conceptual contemporaneity, a freshness, that makes it utterly relevant to the way art is made and looked at now.
Exhibition Supported by
The Henry Moore Foundation, Institut Francais, Institut Francais d’Ecosse, The French Embassy, London
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Jean-Marc Bustamante Dead Calm
• DVD 15 mins
Narcissus Reflected The myth of narcissus in surrealist and contemporary art
Curated by David Lomas and Dawn Ades
Exhibition 22 April – 26 June 2011
Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, Claude Cahun, Salvador Dalí, Charles Henri Ford, Florence Henri, Jean Cocteau, Jess Yayoi Kusama, Willard Maas, George Minne, Pierre Molinier, Paul Nash, George Platt Lynes, Pipilotti Rist
Narcissus Reflected explores both Narcissus and narcissism. Narcissus is the beautiful youth from Greek mythology, turned by the gods into a narcissus flower as punishment for his self-obsession and inability to love anyone other than his own reflection. Narcissism was identified by Sigmund Freud as a passing phase in the development of a ‘normal’ ego. Narcissus Reflected is a scholarly yet also personal, speculative and eclectic journey into the realm of Narcissus. At its appropriately doubled heart lies Salvador Dalí’s painting
Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) and Narkissos (1976-91) the masterwork of the San-Franciscan artist Jess. Dalí’s painting is one of the most famous, most well-travelled and most reproduce works of modern art, although this exhibition offers a rare chance to see the painting alongside the poem Dalí wrote to accompany it, and a wealth of preparatory sketches and other material. Jess’s large, hand-drawn collage, by contrast, has never before traveled outside America. This exhibition presents it for the first time together with all the material of its making – sketches, a pin board with all the collage’s sources, and a preparatory notebook.
Narcissus Reflected weaves a web of connections around these two great pictures, following the thread of Narcissus through experimental film and photography from the 1920s to the 1960s, winding up in the big, immersive contemporary environments of Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden (1966) and Pippilotti Rist’s Sip My Ocean (1996). The works in the exhibition keep in play the full variety of meanings of the myth of Narcissus, the exhibition exploring, and seeking to explain, the enduring appeal of the Narcissus subject in art.
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Narcissus Reflected
• DVD 15 mins
Ingrid Calame
Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition 5 August – 9 October 2011
The Fruitmarket Gallery presented the first solo exhibition in Scotland of the work of American artist Ingrid Calame, whose beautifully-coloured, intricate drawings and paintings have a specific, if abstracted relationship to the world.
The exhibition presented the development of Calame’s singular visual language from her earliest tracings on her studio floor to her most recent workings and reworkings; bringing together drawings and paintings made from 1994 to 2011, including a new wall drawing, L.A. River at Clearwater Street 2006-8 (2011) made especially for and in The Fruitmarket Gallery.
The sources of most of the work are markings from the dried-out concrete banks of the L.A. River, and three locations in Buffalo, New York: the ArcelorMittal Steel Shipping Building, the Perry Street Projects wading pool, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery car park.
The paintings and drawings all begin with Calame tracing marks, stains and cracks on the ground. She then combines, layers and retraces the tracings before transforming them into drawings in coloured pencil or pure pigment, and paintings in enamel or, more recently, oil paint. The works that result from this singular process are beautiful and intelligent abstractions. Displayed in a gallery, they retain their connection with the world outside at several removes, exerting an oddly insistent presence.
The exhibition opened with a work that makes material the journey from ground to wall, sspspss…UM biddle BOP (1997), a huge painting on Mylar (architectural tracing paper) that drapes from the gallery wall to the floor, taking up equal parts of wall and floor.
Calame locates material and metaphorical value in forms on the ground, but the works themselves also carry with them a narrative sensibility she calls micro-histories. For instance, in ArcelorMittal Steel Shipping Building One, No. 233 (2009), the orange parking bay number 233 and accompanying oil stains are legible. Calame describes her process as a way of ‘making frozen moments rather than using the narrative structure that a time-based medium involves’, building up a vocabulary of forms through reusing particular markings in different works and proposing a language all her own, a fusion of figuration and abstraction.
In the upstairs gallery space, work from 2010-11 presented this fusion on a grander scale. The new wall drawing, L.A. River at Clearwater Street 2006-8 (2011), was presented together with a series of her most recent work. In all of her work, Calame recuperates the overlooked or neglected remains of human actions, instrumental, incidental or accidental. The compositions capture time, making plain its passing and our inevitable mortality.
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Narcissus Reflected
• DVD 15 mins
Bill Bollinger
Exhibition 28 October 2011 – 8 January 2012
The Fruitmarket Gallery is proud to present this major exhibition of the work of American artist Bill Bollinger (1939–1988), one of the most important artists of the 1960s. A work of art historical rediscovery as well as an exhibition of great power and beauty, it brings an artist once mentioned in the same breath as Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse and Fred Sandback back for serious reconsideration.
Bollinger’s work is characterised by his sensitive use of the idiosyncrasies and possibilities offered by technical and industrial materials. His use of aluminium pipes, rope, rubber hoses, chain-link fencing, lightbulbs and wheelbarrows is as radical and direct as it is elegant, exploiting physical laws such as gravity, balance, and the intrinsic properties of water. His sculpture, created in the 1960s at the height of the space race, has an astonishing energy and power, even today.
The exhibition brings together major sculptures and drawings by Bollinger, including most of his existing works from collections in Europe and America, and careful reconstructions of lost works from his celebrated solo exhibitions, and from his participation in iconic group exhibitions from the late 1960s in New York. It provides the first ever overview of Bollinger’s brief, but extremely intense, artistic career, and provides an opportunity to rediscover the radical practice of this exceptional artist who, in his own words, was ‘not interested in the aesthetics of form but the fact of form’; who considered his work ‘not as primarily expressive through form but declarative through state’.
Organised by the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in collaboration with The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art Karlsruhe.
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
• Webfilm
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication Bill Bollinger
• DVD 15 mins
