In 1983 he met the artist Bernard Bazile and began a three-year collaboration during which the pair created conceptual works bearing the joint signature BazileBustamante.
In 1994 the Kröller-Müller Museum and sculpture park in the Netherlands commissioned an exhibit for its pavilion designed by the modernist architect Gerrit Rietveld.
In the 1990s Bustamante experimented with a series of paintings on thick, sculptural sheets of silk-screened Plexiglas fastened to the wall with steel brackets.
[2] In 2011, he had a solo exhibition in Villa Medici in Rome curated by Éric de Chassey, and presented an extensive show of his work entitled Dead Calm, both at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and at the same time at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
In the catalogue Emma Dexter wrote: "Bustamante's approach seeks to ex-plore the gaps, ambiguities and correspondences between media, testing the thinness or robustness of the delineation of each medium, aiming always at their redefinition and reinvention."
On 7 December 2016, Bustamante was elected member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, taking the place of the painter Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013).