Galerie Perrotin (Paris) is presenting a double solo project featuring new works by artist JR and a series of never exhibited before photographs by Man Ray in collaboration with Galerie 1900-2000 (Paris).
JR creates monumental photographs that he pastes around the world, infiltrating urban space with anonymous portraits, witnesses of the present and the past. He reveals art by action, displaying his gigantic prints over the suburban buildings of Paris, on walls in the Middle East , in the United States, in favelas in Brazil or on broken bridges in Africa, on the facade of Tate Modern in London…
Photographs from 3 different series by JR are displayed at Paris Photo, Los Angeles 2013:
The Unframed series is a first in JR’s career: he previously worked with his own photographs, but this time he has immersed himself in the collections of the Lausanne Musée de l’Élysée. By reinterpreting and taking the works out of context, he gives the photographs a new meaning and allows us to revisit works by Man Ray, Robert Capa, Gilles Caron, Helen Levitt, Mario Giacomelli, as well as anonymous photographers. Reframed and stretched on the outdoor facades that serve as exhibition walls, the city is transformed into a gigantic open-sky museum.
The Wrinkles of the City is a world-scale project aimed to be presented in various cities around the world (Cartagena, Havana, Shanghai…) where human wrinkles as well as architectural, can be found. For this project in Los Angeles, JR wishes to oppose the crow’s-feet of older people living in LA and the marks of their past with the image of perfection or regenerated beauty in the XXIst century. With this approach, the most interesting part of the project is to spread these wrinkled portraits in the city, using the gigantic urban development as a huge canvas.
JR received the prestigious TED Prize in 2011 that offered him to make a “wish to change the world”. With the Inside Out Project, JR brings together and prints portraits, as messages of personal identity; he constructively raises questions about the sophisticated contemporary social and human issues inherent to the urban context. Literally, he brings out the inside stories of the city by making them visible and aesthetically engaging through mesmerizing portraiture. On this occasion, photo booths printing large-scale self-portraits were seen in various places of the globe, including Paris (Centre Pompidou & Galerie Perrotin), Arles (Rencontres de la Photographie), Hong Kong (Galerie Perrotin), Tel Aviv or Ramallah.
