JR: Chronicles
The street is its natural habitat. Its largest exhibition hall. And he has exhibited in the streets of half the world. Especially, in places where he not only wanted to leave an aesthetic and artistic mark (which he also did) but where by spreading his immense black and white photographs, he also printed a denunciation and a social and political discourse.
He understands art as protest and, since he “found a camera in the Paris metro in 2001”, he has wanted to take it out of the classic spaces, the museums, to reach more people. He has done it. JR is today an artist, not just a street artist, and museums claim him. The next? The Brooklyn Museum that will open on October 4 _ JR: Chronicles ,_ the largest retrospective dedicated to the Parisian to date.
Inside Out project.
The exhibition will be a review of his work from the last 15 years, but, above all, the premiere of a new large mural The Chronicles of New York City (_New York City Chronicles) _ which collects the photographs of more than a thousand people that he photographed and interviewed in New York during the summer of 2018.
“Over the last two decades, JR has emerged as one of the most powerful storytellers of our time." says Drew Sawyer, one of the exhibit's curators. “Working at the intersection of photography, social engagement and street art, his collaborative public projects have allowed his participants to choose how they want to be represented in their communities and the global medium.”
In recent years, JR has achieved fame and increased media attention thanks to some spectacular projects, such as when he made the Louvre Pyramid disappear, and the documentary film that he directed together with his great friend, the filmmaker Agnes Varda, Faces and places with which they came to be nominated for an Oscar.
At the exhibition, which he will be open until May 3, you will be able to see some of his first projects, such as Expo 2 Rue (2001-2004), in which he documented the graffiti community. EITHER Portrait of a Generation (2004-2006), portraits of young people from the suburbs of Les Bosquets, which he made with his friend, a neighbor from the neighborhood and a filmmaker Ladj Ly (recent winner of the Jury Prize for his film The Miserables) .
And so the Louvre disappeared.
It will also collect one of his most played works, face 2 face (2007), in which he pitted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians, people with the same jobs (teachers, doctors, artists, religious leaders) who lived on either side of the wall. It was considered the largest illegal photography exhibition in Israel. Y Women Are Heroes (2008-2009), where he photographed the eyes and faces of important women in public life in Africa, India... and pasted them in their own communities to pay homage to them.
You know, if you needed an excuse to go to New York for another fall: take note of October 4 JR: Chronicles at the Brooklyn Museum.