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

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. 

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.

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/