artist/ JR

France

JR, a contemporary artist born in 1983, grew up in the Paris region. He studied at the Pierre-et-Marie-Curie secondary school in Le Pecq in the Yvelines. In 2001, when he found a camera in the Paris metro, he decided to travel around Europe to discover urban art. What interests him? Vertical boundaries, the walls and facades that structure cities and sometimes separate them. Through the eyes and faces he photographs, JR wants to give these faded walls a soul. His aim is to provoke local people to question the meaning of their work and the meaning of the world.

JR exhibits his monumental black-and-white photographs on the concrete walls and rusty roofs of cities around the world, from Paris to Marseille, via Shanghai, New York, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the shanty towns of Kibera in Kenya and the separation barrier of the broken city of Bethlehem. He displays portraits of anonymous people who populate the streets. Anonymous people who make urban art their own by becoming players in these artistic projects.

In 2004, he produced “Portraits de Génération”, in which the faces of young people from the suburbs were displayed in very large formats. Initially an illegal project, it eventually won over the city of Paris. In 2007, he produced Face2Face, an installation composed of huge posters of portraits of Israelis and Palestinians facing each other in eight towns across the country and on the wall that separates them. The faces are grimacing or hilarious.