Jane Bustin: After Velazquez, 2007
JANE BUSTIN
PAINTINGS 1998-2008
19 November - 20 December 2008
SPECIAL EVENT: Monday 8 December 6.30-10pm
Paintings 1998-2008
Jane Bustin’s abstract paintings are described as 'emotional minimalism'. This solo exhibition at Artprojx Space is a retrospective of selected works from projects that have been shown in museum and gallery contexts over the last ten years, alongside several new pieces.
Bustin is renowned for her innovative and subtle use of colour, materials and supports in making correlations between paintings and the written word. She has collaborated with writers such as Helene Cixous, Tracy Chevalier, John Hull and Andrew Renton and the scientist Dr Richard Brown, inventor of NPL Superblack.
These small intense minimal paintings are made after reflecting on a variety of poetic texts including Celan and Mallarme, as well as referencing historical paintings such as Velazquez.
Bustin is a persistent observer. She absorbs the world around her, the lines in a modern building, the quirky name of a boarded-up hotel. The shade of pinky-grey blush on a front-path flagstone after a shower recalls the skin tone of an early Renaissance masterpiece. She does not reproduce that world, yet the lights and darks, roughs and smooth seem to recycle place, face, time, season, mood.
The viewer, looking at Bustin's paintings, draws on their own information and comes face to face with their own string of reminiscences, sensations and propositions. These paintings exist within a web of possible connections that cannot be put into words; they shuttle between real and imagined, between the strictly private and the openly shared.Martin Holman, Correspondences essay, 2008
This exhibition at Artprojx Space precedes Bustin's exhibition ‘Unseen’ A Collaboration’ the result of a two year exchange with the writers Tracy Chevalier and John Hull to be shown at The British Library from 12 January - 14 March 2009. Clck here for the pdf press release for 'Unseen'.
This exhibition is in association with the Eagle Gallery www.emmahilleagle.com
Jane Bustin studio (featuring: Velazquez handkerchief, 2008)
Jane Bustin
The British artist Jane Bustin explores the processes and subject matter of contemporary abstract painting through a practice that combines traditional techniques with a wide variety of materials including aluminium, wood, copper and a recently formulated material NPL Superblack. Bustin modifies her treatment of paint and utilises the qualities and scale of these various supports to make reference to sources and subject matter that explore the nature of perception.
Bustin’s paintings are initiated following intense periods of research or collaboration and have been described as correspondences with, or visualisations of other creative disciplines.
Past projects include ‘Atemwende’ a sequence of diptychs made in response to neologisisms found in the poetry of Paul Celan and ‘Violet and the War’, an installation of paintings and texts that wove together references from a Second World War correspondence between her grandparents, with William Henry Perkin’s experiments into chemicals derived from coal tar, which gave rise to the synthetic production of the colour violet.
Bustin’s paintings recently featured in (and gave title to) ‘Darkness Visible’, a joint exhibition between the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull and Southampton City Art Gallery. Depicting various contemporary individuals’ sense of ‘blackness’ her paintings reduced traditional portraiture to the barest essentials, focusing on the psychological identities of the sitters. Jane Bustin is represented by the Eagle Gallery, London.
Jane Bustin: Holzlied - Woodsong, 2008
Various texts and quotes from reviews on Jane Bustin's work:
Jane Bustin's paintings are minimal, simple abstracts of subdued colour. ... Her unusual approach often involves a protracted conversation with a writer - she has collaborated with Tracy Chevalier, Andrew Renton, John Hull and Helene Cixous - before she begins painting in an attempt to find the correlations between art and the written word. Not that Bustin's interest is always piqued by poetry, as can be seen in this 10-year retrospective; she will be inspired by a Renaissance painting or the name of a boarded-up hotel. The result requires a little effort from the viewer, but is all the better for it.
Jessica Lack, The Guardian, Artprojx Space Exhibition preview, 15 November 2008
These paintings can appear at odds with their own pleasure. Like the arrival of a telegram boy at the door of long-ago households, they are greeted with conflicting emotions of the sheer joy of contact, of the search for meaning beyond grasp, and the possibility of loss. Mallarmé wrote about the “fury against the formless”; caught between raw emotive power and lyrical assurance, his poetry could seem both restless and passionate. The isolation on the white page made his words vital and coherent. There is awareness of that phrase in Jane; whether she knows it, I cannot say.
Martin Holman, Correspondences essay
Read Martin Holman's 'Correspondence' full text on Jane Bustin
Jane Bustin: Beloved, 2008
Jane Bustin makes visually and physically spare works that can appear minimalist but in fact harbour layers of allusion. While her pieces are formally very considered and beautiful, they are also convincing in their wider references and strategies and she comes across as a thoughtful and intriguing artist.
Aidan Dunne, Irish Times
This could be a show of chilled vintage minimalism – the works are all diptych’s, one monochrome rectangle abutting another – instead, it is a sensuous delight
Martin Herbert, Time Out
Jane Bustin: Velazquez handkerchief, 2008
...Jane Bustin embraces a commitment to representing what seems unrepresentable .... this pursuit of 'excess' is made to develop from a clear preoccupation with materials. …. she uses pure pigment, laying them onto her surfaces in order to create deeply chromatic effects and tactile sensations. She also employs differences of scale - with works ranging from under six inches to ten-foot long - and makes pieces which both follow the plane of the wall and also extend at ninety degrees to it. But such physicality is combined with the desire to produce poetic resonances, to evoke a level of meaning which cannot be reduced to intelligible significance. She creates an inner, glowing luminosity in her work...
Simon Morley, Extract from The Condition of Painting, Contemporary Visual Arts, issue 15
Jane Bustin: meerhaar - seahair, 2001
...Jane Bustin’s small rectangular oil paintings - each one a diptych triggered by a neologism of Celan and constructed on a geometric grid - almost succeed in keeping their emotions under tight control, almost resist transcendence.
The paintings recall and may be influenced by other Jewish artists like Newman and Rothko, with a theological suggestion floating around that the numinous shall be abstract rather than figurative ...
... Jane Bustin’s strongly defined paintings are ‘stations of reading in the late word’ (Celan’s phrase). Colouring our understanding of a great poet, too small to draw one in (unlike Kiefer’s gigantic readings of Celan), they whisper the absence of the unbecoming dead...
Anthony Rudolf, extract from Commemorative Encounters, Artistic Responses to Levi and Celan, The Jewish Quarterly