WHAT LIES BENEATH
London, May 2025
Pirelli nudes sensually collide with abstract art in a reflective new series of works by Jane Bustin.
Right Brass, 2024, wood, lenticular 1970, acrylic, copper, side view detail
Who? Best known for creating her own abstract language through her intimate and minimalist constructions, often exploring traditions of portraiture with hard-edge constructivist painting – British artist Jane Bustin has garnered a great deal of attention with her latest series of work, “Pirelli, let me count the ways [Part II]”, her third solo exhibition with The Jane Lombard Gallery. As a response to the tyre brand's famous pin up calendar, Bustin explores how the mainstream feminist consciousness awakened to how the fantasies played out in the glossy pages of the Pirelli Calendar and the stereotypical imagery of women that has historically prevailed across all realms of visual culture, contributed to the objectification and denigration of women.
Left Brass, 2024, wood, lenticular 1970, acrylic, copper
What? Mixed media paintings, with pin-up images by Pirelli’s first female photographer, Sarah Moon, which lie beneath Bustin’s abstract paintings, alongside porcelain, fabric, or wood, in abstract, geometric grids rendered in a soft, nuanced colour palette with copper tones and rich hues. Each work presents a month in the Pirelli calendar with Part two of the series forming July to December, evoking the seasons familiar hues. The exhibition also features vintage lenticular-based images and the rearranged text of a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which sits with a ceramic bowl made by Bustin; and a video filmed in the poet’s home in the Victorian-era – each item weaving narratives together to reframe the female gaze.
Left Ruffling Hair, 2025, wood, copper, acrylic, 1970s lenticular, gossamer silk, tea
Right Nude Denim, 2024, copper, lenticular 1970, voile, paper, tea, acrylic, wood
Why? “The way in which I work is a mixture of haptic events and research”, says Bustin. “This series started when I was asked to be in an exhibition in Majorca and the theme was about the body, and so I decided to make a painting based on the idea of the nude, using my own skin colour as a reference, and it was in the vain of work I’ve made in a similar sense – always quite minimal and abstract but has some sort of concept around it that suggests it’s about something else, leading to the viewer asking questions about what it is. I was thinking about what to call the painting and as I had finished it in January, I thought about “Nude January” for a title. That then reminded me of the pin-up calendars that were around in the 1970s, of nude women, which you would often see hanging on the wall in your friend’s dad’s garage, in Suburbia where I grew up outside of London.
I remember this feeling I had of why a nice dad like that would have naked women hanging up in his garage, and that started my train of thought into the Pirelli, calendars, so I did some research and found a catalogue about them through the ages.”
Right Export, 2024, wood, copper, lenticular 1970, paper, tea, acrylic
Here Jane explains the theme of the series and exhibition…
ELEVATING THE FEMINIST GAZE
“Pirelli chose the photographer Harry Peccinotti to shoot its 1968 calendar, and he selected some poems to inspire each photograph, including one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and I was so surprised, (this is where the haptic events happen in my work), as I had been reading an autobiography about Browning, and stayed in her former home in Florence – that’s the little film you see of it in the exhibition.
I never would have put Elizabeth and Pirelli together, it’s so unusual, and then when I found out which Sonnet of Browning’s that Peccinotti chose, Sonnet no 23, I just thought it was a strange coincidence. He had obviously been drawn to her because of the romance of her poetry, but she was also famous for having written the first prose poem “Aurora Leigh” in 1856 and so inadvertently, he had used a feminist icon for the Pirelli calendar.
I was then fascinated researching the photographs that Sarah Moon took for the calendar in 1972, as I realised, I was quite familiar with her work having grown up in the 1970s, and she shot the Cacharel campaign for the perfume Anaïs Anaïs, featuring all these young women in a romantic, ethereal style. The perfume was named after Anaïs Nin, a feminist icon in the 1970s for her writings of erotica, particularly “The Delta of Venus”. She wrote those books for money, to finance herself and to be able to write what she wanted to write, surrealist stories. So there does seem to be this thread running through all these women, the sexuality and the feminist developments that came out of it.
For the Pirelli shoot, Sarah Moon chose a villa outside of Paris which was the former headquarters of the Gestapo, and although she dressed these women in romantic, 1930s style clothes in pastel shades with amber lighting; on the surface it looked romantic, but when you look at it, they were all posing as prostitutes in a bordello. So, in fact what she did for Pirelli was to present women as sex workers in a building during interrogation. That visual was very different to the effect of the calendar people thought they would see. I liked that duality of things not being quite as they seemed.
Right September, 2025, acrylic, wood, paper, tea, copper
MATERIALS AND DUALITY
“I’ve always been very interested in formal abstraction and materials in terms of paints, colour, form, texture, and I’ve been working like that for quite a long time and in a sense, developing my own abstract language. In a way, I’ve been wanting to create a female aesthetic, as when I look at painters I admire like Donald Judd and Robert Ryman and Barnett Newman, there is a masculinity in the way those works are constructed. So, I’m drawn to the idea of using what I see as part of a female aesthetic. A lot of people have often commented that my work is very beautiful or intimate or has some kind of sexual sense to it, and I think I ‘ve always played on the borders of that and never really addressed it. With this project, because of the context, it meant I could really delve into this idea I’ve had of the female aesthetic and present it more head on.
Without being too illustrative in terms of thinking; like autumn must have autumnal colours, it was more about taking references from Moon’s photographs and the colours I think of when I think of the feeling of July or what textures are suggested thinking about that month. That’s a way into the abstract language; you’re painting the feeling or what it makes you feel.
Left December, 2024, acrylic, wood, copper, silk, aluminium, tulle, side detail
INNER STRENGTH
“I’m interested in Korean, Chinese and Japanese tea bowls, and about 10 years ago I learned how to make them and work with clay, switching mediums and became obsessed with that. I didn’t know how to place them within my work, as they were always put in the craft category and it got me thinking about craft, which has traditionally been seen as women’s work, the making of things is a female activity. That’s what Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “Aurora Leigh” observes about middle class women of that time who weren’t given anything to do apart from pastimes of embroidery or darning stockings or reading, and instead of those being valued, they were always dismissed as unimportant. I saw a parallel there in the bowls I made from porcelain, which have these connotations of fragility and imperfection but at the same time, porcelain has this huge endurance as you can’t destroy it, so it’s about this inner strength and weakness at the same time. That’s why I chose to place it with the text work of Browning’s poem in the exhibition.
Left August - Pirelli, let me count the ways, 2025, acrylic, wood, silk, copper. With Pirelli calendar 1972 under rose tinted handmade glass
Right November - Pirelli, let me count the ways, 2024, acrylic, wood, silk, copper. With Pirelli calendar 1972 under rose tinted handmade glass
WAYS OF SEEING
“My husband found a little lenticular on the ground in the yard where my studio is, and it had the image of a woman standing naked and when you flipped it, it changed to another naked image of a woman holding a gun. I found some similar lenticulars from the 1970s on eBay and I noticed that in the latter part of the 70s, they got a bit darker. They went from being frivolous and sort of charming, to something more violent, such as one where this man was standing behind a woman in a more aggressive and sinister way.
They were so curious, and it was so interesting to think they were collectibles… you could literally unclothe someone at your will. I thought they would be interesting to include in the exhibition.”
CHANGE AND EVOLVE
“I think Elizabeth’s poetry is of a certain time, but you can hear her strength in her voice, and it still stands as being from a strong independent woman, especially in “Aurora Leigh”, it could be written today. I wanted to use the title “let me count the ways” as there is still this confusion today in the way women are presented. Back then, Elizabeth was quite attractive, and she liked to put her hair in curls, and wore big blue satin dresses and she had this frivolous feminine side. However, due to the way in which she presented herself to people, they would often dismiss her and not take her seriously for what she thought or wrote. In terms of the Sarah Moon pictures, I think I’m interested in more subtle representations of women that pigeonhole them into a lesser being or a sexual position, but it’s done in a subtle way, and not so obvious. It’s a grey area, and that was why I chose the title for the exhibition as a play on words… let me tell you the ways in which this is annoying! [laughs]
Pirelli, let me count the ways [Part II] by Jane Bustin is on view at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, from May 2nd to June 21st, 2025
Left top Suede Revolver, 2024, wood, copper, aluminium, 1970s lenticular, suede, acrylic, oyster shell
Left bottom Brass, 2024, wood, brass, acrylic, 1970s lenticular
Installation view of Pirelli, let me count the ways [Part II] at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York
Text by Kate Lawson
Studio pictures Jane Bustin, 2025, courtesy of the artist
Installation views by Adam Reich
All artworks courtesy of the artist and Jane Lombard Gallery