"万花筒," Galleria Continua Beijing, 2025

JR’s first solo exhibition in Beijing is now open, bringing together artworks from projects spanning the past twenty years.

The exhibition begins with a site-specific anamorphic installation. From a marked point on the floor, the gallery wall appears to crack open, revealing a pavilion from Beijing’s Summer Palace in the distance.

The ground floor presents a sequence of trompe-l’œil projects that transformed well-known European façades: Punto di Fuga (Palazzo Farnese, Rome), La Ferita (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence), and Les Falaises du Trocadéro (Paris), shown alongside works from the Déplacé·e·s series.

Upstairs, three halls present plaster “paperblocks,” including images from Omelia Contadina (San Gimignano, 2020), created with filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, as well as works from Unframed. A side hall is dedicated to La Nascita (Milan, 2024), where JR overlaid the excavated mountains of the Simplon passage onto Milan Central Station. Another hall features Greetings from Giza (2021), a trompe-l’œil installed before the Pyramid of Khafre, as the closest artwork made in relation to the pyramid.

The top floor concludes with works from The Wrinkles of the City presented on wood. From Cartagena (2008) to Shanghai (2010), Los Angeles (2011), Havana (2012, with José Parlá), Berlin (2013), and Istanbul (2015), JR traced the passage of time by pasting aging faces onto buildings, bringing together the wrinkles of cities and their inhabitants into a single image.

Galleria Continua Beijing

2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang, Beijing, China, 100102