Jean-Marc Bustamante Panorama

The Ludwig Museum Koblenz presents Panorama, a retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante (*1952, Toulouse), one of France’s most distinguished artists. As an internationally renowned conceptual artist and a consistent boundary-crosser between photography, sculpture, installation, and painting, he challenges established categories of art, continually developing new forms of visual and spatial experience from their intersection. Throughout his career, he has continually questioned and redefined established categories, both through his use of diverse techniques—including drawing and digital processes—and through his move beyond the traditional canvas towards materials such as Plexiglas, steel and plaster. His work encompasses both open pictorial fields and, by contrast, highly self-contained wall-based surfaces.

Since the mid-1970s, Bustamante has used a large-format camera to photograph seemingly unremarkable wastelands, urban outskirts, landscapes and places of transition—the so-called Tableaux. These works constitute his first ‘photographic paintings’, in which he began to dissolve the boundaries between photography and painting in innovative ways. […]

From the late 1980s onwards, Bustamante increasingly developed his engagement with photography in relation to space. In works such as Landschaften, Innenräume, he brings photography and sculpture together, making materiality, surface qualities and architectural context integral to the work. […]

Bustamante’s artistic outlook extends beyond his own production to encompass the fields of education, mediation and institutional responsibility. Through his work as a curator, festival director, professor and director of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, he has approached art history not as a closed canon, but as an open dialogue between different generations, cultural perspectives and artistic positions.

Curated by Prof. Dr. Beate Reifenscheid, Director, Ludwig Museum Koblenz