The photographer and street artist known as JR, is currently showcasing murals, photographs, videos, films, dioramas, and archival materials at the Brooklyn Museum. Titled, ‘JR: Chronicles’, the exhibition launched 4 October this year and comes as the first major exhibition in North America by the French-born artist.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a paste-up mural, ‘The Chronicles of New York City’, located in the courtyard of the Kings Theatre in Flatbush. In collaboration with the local community, JR took pictures of more than one thousand individuals and reproduced them on a large scale to occupy the space with a pictorial narrative of day to day life in the area.
As described by the Brooklyn Museum, ‘JR: Chronicles’ traces the artist’s career from his early documentation of graffiti as a teenager in Paris to his large-scale architectural interventions in cities worldwide, and his more recent digitally collaged murals that create collective portraits of public life.
JR started off as a graffiti artist, though after finding a camera in the Paris metro in 2001 he would go on to make his name by wheatpasting his photography on the street, rubbing shoulders with the likes of HBO, Robert De Niro, and Agnès Varda, with his works being welcomed by communities, galleries, and museums alike all over the world.
Today he is known for honouring the voices of everyday people, having demonstrated an ongoing commitment to community through projects that have reframed thugs, underlined the dignity of women, and told the story of riots. You may also know JR for making the Louvre in France disappear through anamorphosis in 2016, or for the biggest illegal exhibition when he pasted large portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities in 2007. As explained by JR, “Art can bring perceived opposites together.”
‘JR: Chronicles’ is held in conjunction with Brooklyn Falls for France, 2019 and is on view until 3 May 2020. For more about JR, visit his website or follow him on Instagram. For more about the exhibition, visit the Brooklyn Museum event page.
