The Chronicles of New York City, Domino Park, USA, 2020 (3).jpg

JR

Eye to the World

Past
Jun 4 – Jul 3, 2021
London

Bringing together photographs from several significant bodies of work, JR: Eye to the World explores JR’s unique view of humanity as he transcends borders, politics, and cultural identity through the camera lens.

Exhibition Details

JR
Eye to the World
June 4 – July 3, 2021

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On View in New York

JR: Tehachapi
June 4 – August 21, 2021
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Gallery

6 Burlington Gardens
London

Above: JR, The Chronicles of New York City, Domino Park, USA, 2020 © JR, Courtesy of the Artist and Perrotin, Photographer: Claire Dorn

Press

Press Release

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JR’s practice is rooted in his deep commitment to collaborating with individuals and communities alike. His work is characterised by large-scale photographic interventions in urban environments that address cultural and political issues, often with an emphasis on social justice. Each portrait holds a multitude of stories as JR expertly balances the macroscopic with the microscopic, the individual experience with the universal. JR: Eye to the World brings together artworks from several significant bodies of work, and explores JR’s unique view of humanity as he transcends borders, politics, and cultural identity through the camera lens. This exhibition coincides with the artist’s largest solo museum show to date, JR: Chronicles, opening this June at Saatchi Gallery, London.

In parallel with the exhibition in London, Pace in New York will also display work from JR’s recent project in Tehachapi, California. An installation from JR’s Tehachapi series including photographic works, a wall pasting, and a video will be presented in the Library at 540 West 25th Street.

Tehachapi

In 2019 JR began a series of projects with inmates at the maximum-security prison in the Californian mountains. One aspect of the project included JR photographing the inmates, recording their stories, and collaborating with them to paste their portraits in the prison yard, which resulted in the triptych Tehachapi, Daytime, Triptych, U.S.A. (2019), on view in New York.

Tehachapi, Mountain, February 7, 2020, 6.48p.m., U.S.A. by JR JR — JR JR, *Tehachapi, Mountain, February 7, 2020, 6.48p.m., U.S.A.*, 2020, color print, mounted on dibond, glass, oak wood frame, 105 cm × 160 cm (41-5/16" × 63")

Click play to watch the story behind the Tehachapi project.

In 2020 he returned to the prison to enlist the inmates in a new project: to wheat paste a black and white photograph of the bottom half of the Tehachapi Mountains on the inside of the prison’s high walls. In Tehachapi, Mountain, February 7, 2020, 6.48p.m., U.S.A. (2020), on view in London, JR captures where the mountain top perfectly aligns with the pasted image in a fleeting moment of calm as the sun sets behind the mountains and a prisoner runs across a deserted basketball court. Here, JR’s signature anamorphosis technique explores the interplay of reality and illusion, expansion and confinement.

The Gun Chronicles

TIME and JR partnered on a special issue, published on November 5, 2018, which explored the wide range of views surrounding the gun debate in the United States.

To move beyond the familiar, TIME and JR traveled to three U.S. cities profoundly affected by guns—Dallas, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.—to invite people to share their views, describe their experiences and search for common ground. They met hunters and activists, teachers and police officers, parents and children. JR photographed 245 people to create a mural for the cover of TIME, giving a face to the full and complex spectrum of views on guns in America.

The Chronicles
of San Francisco

Long-inspired by the work of Mexican painter Diego Rivera (1886-1957), who completed three murals in San Francisco beginning in 1931, JR has begun to imagine how a whole city and its diversity of residents can be represented through art. After his first mural of Les Bosquets, a neighborhood near Paris where he has worked for many years, JR chose San Francisco for his next urban mural subject and the first that strives to represent an entire city. San Francisco’s long muralist tradition and its stark contrasts—featuring both immense innovation and wealth as well as one of the country’s highest rates of child homelessness—has made it a vibrant and complex site for the artist to explore and capture.

The project began in January of 2018 when JR and his team roamed San Francisco, parking their 53' trailer truck, with a photo-studio installed inside, in more than 22 different locations around the city to capture portraits of anyone passing by who wished to participate. Over the course of the project, nearly 1,200 people were filmed, photographed and interviewed; each person choosing the way they were to be represented in the mural, which is ultimately a portrait of San Francisco and its people.

The Chronicles
of New York City

In May and June 2018, JR's mobile studio was parked at fifteen different locations around the five boroughs of New York City, chosen for being specific crossroads of the city. JR and his team photographed 1,128 New Yorkers, from all walks of life, in their own neighborhoods. The aim was to tell a story of New York City today through art: its energy, its feats, its issues, its people. The result is a monumental mural presented at the Brooklyn Museum from October 2019.

After first being presented during Chronicles at the Brooklyn Museum in 2019, The Chronicles of New York City was installed at Domino Park, in Williamsburg, from January to August 2020, on a wall made of 18 containers created with LOT-EK.

JR au Louvre

The use of everyday papier-mâché materials and techniques borrowed from commercial billboard practices is emblematic of JR’s egalitarian approach to art making. In 2019, JR and 400 volunteers descended upon the Louvre’s courtyard to create JR au Louvre et le Secret de la Grande Pyramide. Made of 2000 strips of paper at 10 meters each, this major work created the illusion of an underground cave beneath the iconic glass pyramid built by IM Pei. Over the ensuing days and weeks, the fragile paper shredded under foot and took on new meaning. Provoking ingrained expectations is paramount to JR’s practice, as he states, ‘You come to the Louvre expecting a work of art to be hanging on a wall and it’s not, it’s on the ground and it blows away.’

Migrants

JR’s photographic work gives voice and visibility to forgotten or erased communities. His interest in the relationship between public and private spaces informs his ideas surrounding walls and borders, examining their impact on access and control. The ongoing migrant crisis has been a driving influence for JR. Migrants, Coeur, Quadrichromie, Jordanie (2018), captures an aerial image of Syrian refugee children gathered in a loose heart shaped formation in a camp in Jordan: a poetic reminder of the humanity of individuals no matter how far away.

Face2Face

In 2007, artists JR and Marco started the Face2Face project: a large-scale illegal photography exhibition in which portraits of Israelis and Palestinians doing the same job were pasted face to face, in monumental formats, on both sides of the border wall and in several Palestinian and Israeli cities.

In JR's words: "We want, at last, everyone to laugh and to think by seeing the portrait of the other and his own portrait. In a very sensitive context, we have to be clear. We are in favour of a solution in which two countries, Israel and Palestine would live peacefully within safe and internationally recognized borders. All the bilateral peace projects (Clinton/Taba, Ayalon/Nusseibeh, Geneva Agreements) are converging into the same direction. We can be optimistic."

28 Millimètres, Portrait d'une génération, B11, Destruction #9, Montfermeil, France by JR JR — JR JR, *28 Millimètres, Portrait d'une génération, B11, Destruction #9, Montfermeil, France*, 2013, color print, mounted on dibond, matt Plexiglas, flushed wooden black frame, 70" × 49" × 2-5/8" (177.8 cm × 124.5 cm × 6.7 cm)

Portrait of a Generation

In 2004, JR held his first exhibition on the wall of Les Bosquets, the 'ghetto' of Montfermeil, a suburb of Paris. In November 2005, in a climate of social discontent triggered by the deaths of two teenage boys who were hiding from police in an electricity substation, riots broke out in Les Bosquets and quickly spread through the city. Rather than only disrupting other neighbourhoods of Paris, the rioters also destroyed their own environment. The media portrayed out-of-control kids throwing Molotov cocktails, attacking cops and firemen and looting anything they could. In reaction to the media treatment of people who had become his friends, in 2006, JR returned to the heart of the district and, with his friend Ladj Ly, a local artist, began a project with the young people of Les Bosquets. Using a 28 mm lens, he shot full-frame portraits of young people pulling scary faces to caricature themselves and pasted the enlarged posters onto the walls of both Les Bosquets and ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) districts of the city.

In 2013, JR learned that the buildings that featured the original pastings in Les Bosquets were soon to be demolished, so he revisited the Portrait of a Generation project. Using the photographs from the original series, JR and his team secretly pasted two-storey-high portraits in the buildings before they were knocked down. During the demolition, the portraits were exposed, creating a new dialogue between the recent history of Paris, its suburbs and their inhabitants.

The Wrinkles of the City: Action in Shanghai

JR’s ongoing global project, The Wrinkles of the City, shines a spotlight on the overlooked, be it a crumbling building or an elderly person. His interest is in the marks left behind by lived experience. Presented in dialogue with one another, the portraits that make up The Wrinkles of the City, despite disparate countries and stories, pay tribute to the communities that shape their cities.

The Wrinkles of the City: Los Angeles

Following The Wrinkles of the City in Cartagena and Shanghai, JR brought the project to Los Angeles in 2011. Los Angeles is the place of origin of the Hollywood myth, with glamour and beauty being part of the identity of the city. For this project, instead of meeting witnesses of the changes that had occurred in the city, JR wanted to juxtapose the wrinkles of the older population of LA with the image of perfection or regenerated beauty in the 21st century.