J A N E - B U S T I N

1964
born UK
1982-83
Hertfordshire College of Art
1983-86
Portsmouth Polytechnic, BA (Hons)
1990
Labotatorio per Affresco, Prato, Italy

2004
Violet and the War, The Eagle Gallery, solo exhibition

Collections

British Land; Pearsons PLC; Unilever PLC; United Overseas Ltd; DLA Solicitors, London; Chelsea College of Art & Design, London; KIAD, Canterbury; The National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Goldman Sachs, London; Yale Center for British Art, CT, USA

“...Jane Bustin embraces a commitment to representing what seems unrepresentable .... this pursuit of 'excess' is made to develop from a clear
preoccupation with materials. In Bustin’s case this can mean sheets of copper, wood, glass, and canvas. 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..."

Extract from The Condition of Painting
by Simon Morley
published in Contemporary Visual Arts, issue 15

“...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...”

Extract from Commemorative Encounters, Artistic Responses to Levi and Celan
by Anthony Rudolf
published in The Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 2000

 

 

 

 

Blossom I 2003 oil on wood, oil on silk 25 x 57cm