As JR returns to the spotlight with the release of a documentary about a Californian prison, let's take a look back at 2019, when the Maison Européenne de la Photographie dedicateda major monograph to him. JR revisited his work with new and playful installations for the general public.
URBAN FEVER
JR is a city man. He began his artistic career by photographing his graffiti artist friends in the capital. Walls remained his favorite medium, always using photography in the form of giant collages. With JR, art invades the city on a massive scale, reaching its peak withthe "Giants" series. Created for the Olympic Games in Rio, Brazil, it features photographs of athletes printed on fabric and placed on huge scaffolding to give the illusion of 3D. It was his craziest project yet, according to the artist, to match the scale of this global event.
A COMMITTED ARTIST
In 2014, JR made a big splash by mobilizing a shipping company and dockworkers aroundthe "Women are heroes" project. A tribute to women, it draws attention to their status as the primary victims of abuse in times of war. The project resulted in the creation of a gigantic work of art on a 363-meter-long container ship departing from the port of Le Havre. The work is a collage spread over more than 180 containers showing the eyes of a young Kenyan woman photographed in 2009 in the Kibera slum. This is one way of exposing art to as many people as possible, rather than just a select circle of insiders, which is one of JR's main objectives. To make the work more playful, a miniature ship has been installed where automatic cranes place containers one by one to form the final collage.
The MEP had not forgotten JR's projects in France, including the now famous "Chronicles of Clichy-Montfermeil": a monumental mural depicting more than 800 residents of the two towns. This is another way of representing the diversity of the suburbs, whichwas recently the subject of a documentary. As a sign of institutional recognition, the work was inaugurated by French President François Hollande in April 2017.
JR, everyone has seen him on social media, but who really knows the extent of his work? The monograph that the MEP devoted to him answered that question effectively. "I own the largest art gallery in the world: the walls of the entire world," explained the artist. This was also the limitation of the exhibition "Momentum, la mécanique de l'épreuve" (Momentum, the mechanics of the test), which was severely constrained by the cramped layout of the venue, sometimes requiring long waits for certain installations, and which could conflict with the oversized formats that made the artist famous.
