Jean-Marc Bustamante @ Fruitmarket Gallery

With Jean-Marc Bustamante, the Fruitmarket is decidedly moving on from the visually striking Childish Things (Paul McCarthy’s zipped open doll, anyone?) to a show that promises to be much, much more conceptual.

Don’t let this scare you away though, for Bustamante isn’t the old cliché of the conceptual artist, with intellectualism pushed to a ridiculous extreme and work so dense it is impossible to grasp. One of France’s senior artists and a major figure in the international art world, Bustamante has worked with photography, sculpture, painting, architecture and installation and was chosen to represent France at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.

Starting as a photographer, Bustamante was first noticed for his Tableaux, a series of large-scale colour photographs of the Barcelona suburbs, arresting with their focus on concrete landscapes with little charm. He extended this work in the 90s with more photos of unnamed cities, ultimately succeeding in creating not portraits but atmosphere, and the fleeting feeling that something is missing (actually the title of his project). Often characterised by its blurring of boundaries between the various materials used, Bustamante’s work presents the visitor with a quiet, hypnotic depiction of the world around him.

Such photos will be found in the show, as well as sculptures and more recent work from the last decade, including a series of painting on Plexiglas completed in 2010 especially for this exhibition.

As usual with the Fruitmarket, the programme of talks deserves highlighting and includes an in-conversation between Bustamante and Penelope Curtis (recently appointed director of Tate Britain) and a talk by fellow artist and Skinny favourite Neil Clements. [Adeline Amar]