HORIZONTAL, JR's first solo gallery show in New York City

2018 Jul 3 - 01:22

JR's first solo show in NYC features on two floors approximately 30 new works, including a series of mechanical sculptures and a video projection. With his electric trains and model container ship, JR evokes the spirit of childlike wonderment and play. Mechanical train cars move forward and backward on their rails, converging and diverging to produce the image of a face that vanishes as soon as the train cars move again. In his model cargo ship, mechanical arms load and unload containers, the building blocks of a gaze.

The gaze is an ongoing theme for JR, and Horizontal presents a new take on this as he introduces glass as a support for images of eyes. Some works isolate a single eye on a double floating pane, while works like Inside Out, Ramallah - Tel-Aviv combine the eyes of two individuals across border walls and political divides.

For this show, JR has staged an intervention on the gallery building’s historic facade, as a human figure installed on a steel armature, appears to peek into the interior of the building. This work is reminiscent of JR’s Kikito installation (2017), the image of a child peering over the Mexican border wall, similarly mounted on scaffolding.

New works by JR take up the four-color printing process of printed advertising posters. This harkens to many of JR’s in situ wheat paste installations, but re-introduces color and embraces the dotted, graphic sensibility of this particular technical process. Shown alongside these works are the four-color plates that are used for printing ‘billboards,’ affording the viewer a glimpse into JR’s process. “It is with these plates of bright colors that the images are printed. Even those who send us back to anxious situations are made up of bright, cheerful reds, yellows and blues. Each of these colors is essential for the constitution of an image,” explains JR.

JR explores new territories while remaining true to his approach of asking questions through artistic installations. The giant eye wheat-pasted on the roof of the gallery in Lower Manhattan is that of Mayra, a “Dreamer,” visible only from the sky of New York, city of dreams and possibilities. Despite the installation’s horizontal orientation, her gaze is cast upwards.

June 28 – August 17, 2018
PERROTIN 130 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002

More pictures below

Le Refettorio Paris - A Social Restaurant

2018 Mar 19 - 22:30

The amazing chef Massimo Bottura opened a permanent restaurant in Paris on place de la Madeleine, called Le Refettorio Paris. The concept is to use what people think is waste and transform it into opportunities! Every night chefs will turn ordinary ingredients into extraordinary meals. This is not a charity project, it's a cultural one. JR created an art installation for the space.

JR at The Armory Show 2018

2018 Mar 19 - 22:10

Invited by The Armory Show, JR’s “So Close,” presented by Artsy and Jeffrey Deitch at the entry to Pier 94, faces us with a line of immigrants, waiting. The archival image from Ellis Island is updated with Syrians’ portraits JR took at the Zaatari refugee camp.

FACES PLACES WON THE SPIRIT AWARDS AND AN ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION!

2018 Mar 19 - 22:02

JR and Agnès Varda traveled the French countryside to meet local residents and produce giant photographic portraits of them. Although they are separated in age by more than half a century, Varda and JR both revel in the power of images and in documenting the lives of everyday people. Their movie, FACES PLACES was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary 2018.

Welcome to Casa Amarela !

2017 Dec 20 - 23:41

JR and Mauricio Hora, local photographer and historian of Morro da Providência, the first favela of Brazil, set up Casa Amarela in 2009 after JR's project "Women are Heroes." Casa Amarela is a cultural house at the top of the oldest favela of Rio de Janeiro, that is used as a cultural center for its residents. The space is used to offer activities around Art, Education, Culture - art workshops, theater, capoeira, dance, yoga, photography, language classes... Casa Amarela is open everyday for residents, who come after school or work to express their artistic and creative selves. Any artist from all over the world can use the space to give a workshop to the youth of the community.

MIND THE GAP

2017 Dec 20 - 22:29

Invited by Chateau La Coste, JR inaugurated a new installation in December 2017. In the Renzo Piano Pavilion, he has created an optical illusion that appears very simple while achieving technical prowess.

Gigantic picnic at the US-Mexico border fence

2017 Oct 17 - 00:28

On October 8th, for the last day of his huge scaffolding installation on the Mexican side of the border between the United States and Mexico, JR organized a gigantic picnic on both sides of the fence. Kikito, his family and hundreds of guests came from the US and Mexico to share a meal together. People gathered around the eyes of a Dreamer, eating the same food, sharing the same water, enjoying the same music (half of the band on each side). The wall was forgotten for a few moments ...

More about the project:

The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/10/us/border-wall-picnic-trnd/
TIME Magazine: http://time.com/4977283/artist-stages-picnic-on-us-mexico-border/

JR in Tecate

2017 Sep 12 - 00:53

JR inaugurated last week a huge scaffolding installation on the Mexican side of the border between the United States and Mexico. The piece is best viewed from the US side of the border. An immense image of Kikito, a one year old boy from the city of Tecate, looks playfully over the infamous border wall. Kikito and his family cannot cross the border to see the artwork from the ideal vantage point.
If you are in Southern California, go and see it before October 2nd; the exact location is: bit.ly/JRinTecate

More about the project
in the New York Times : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/arts/design/jr-artist-mexico-border-wall.html
and the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/the-artist-jr-lifts-a-mexican-child-over-the-border-wall

Faces Places, a film by Agnès Varda and JR

2017 Jun 28 - 22:11

Faces Places, which received the winning prize L'Oeil d'Or of the best documentary at Cannes Festival 2017, is coming out in theaters today in France.
Agnès Varda and JR have similarities: passion and questioning on images in general, and more precisely on places and devices used to show them, share them and exhibit them.
Agnès chose cinema. JR chose to create outdoor pastings.
When Agnès and JR met in 2015, they immediately wanted to work together, to shoot a movie in France, far from cities, travelling with JR's (magical) photo truck. Wether it was random encounters or prepared, they opened up to other people, listened to them, photographed them, and sometime pasted them.
The movie also tells the story of their friendship, which grew along the shooting, between surprises and teasing, laughing at their differences.

JR at Palais de Tokyo: Chroniques de Clichy-Montfermeil

2017 Apr 7 - 16:39

For his third intervention at Palais de Tokyo, JR unveils a monumental fresco of over 150 m2, forming a singular portrait of the inhabitants of Clichy-Montfermeil (Seine-Saint-Denis), suburbs where the popular rebellions that shook France in 2005 began.

After being displayed at Palais de Tokyo from April 2nd to April 13th, the work will then be installed durably at the Cité des Bosquets (Montfermeil).

More pictures below.

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