Perrotin Shanghai presents La Vie en Mouvement, a new solo exhibition by French artist JR. The show features a large-scale installation spanning the gallery and twenty works created over the past decade. Many of the images show ballerinas dancing not on stage but on rooftops, in shipyards, and across the Paris skyline.
In Ballet, Sur les Toits du Louvre #6, Vertical, Paper Block, Paris, France (2021), a dancer appears to slide down the steep roof of the Louvre—a mix of elegance and risk that defines much of JR’s work. His images often explore that space between performance and real life, between daring and grace. Behind the spectacle lies JR’s ongoing social practice—projects that involve communities and transform large-scale ideas into personal moments. His process, as he says, “is the adventure.” The works on view capture that spirit, showing how imagination and collaboration can turn the impossible into something tangible.
JR’s connection with the Louvre runs deep. In 2016, and again in 2019, he created large-scale anamorphoses that made I. M. Pei’s famous glass pyramid appear to disappear into the ground. In 2019, hundreds of volunteers worked together on a massive pasting, which slowly faded as visitors walked over them—a poetic reminder that public art lives and disappears through participation.
Throughout the exhibition, the themes of illusion and movement recur. Dancers balance on the edge of rooftops or leap from cranes, caught in moments that seem to defy gravity. Eyes also appear throughout JR’s work—sometimes formed by dancers’ bodies, sometimes seen from above.
The exhibition also revisits JR’s long connection to Le Havre, where his Women Are Heroes project once covered a cargo ship with the eyes of a woman from Kenya. In new images, ballerinas dance among shipping containers, bringing poetry and fragility to an industrial landscape.
More intimate works on wood show dancers resting or curled within boxes—like delicate beings in transit, waiting to emerge again.
Kaleidoscope, a related exhibition of JR opens at Galleria Continua, Beijing, on November 18.
Born in 1983 in Paris, France
Lives and works between Paris, France and New York, NY, USA
JR works at the intersection of photography, public art, filmmaking and social engagement. Over the last two decades, he has created monumental public projects and site-specific interventions in cities all over the world. Whether it be pasting on homes in a Brazilian favela (2008-9), hosting a picnic across the US-Mexico border fence (2017), working alongside 400 volunteers to create a trompe-l’oeil at the Louvre in Paris (2019), or organizing a procession around the enormous banner of a refugee child in the Sahara Desert (2022), JR seeks to involve everyone in the act of artistic creation, hoping to create conversations and drive social change.
He has exhibited his artworks and installations internationally, including the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm with his first exhibition “Déplacé.e.s” in the Nordic region (2024), at the Venice Biennale (2022), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019), and the NGV Triennial (2020). After opening at the Brooklyn Museum, USA (2019), his solo exhibition “JR: Chronicles” traveled to Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2021), Groninger Museum, Netherlands (2021), Kunsthalle Munich, Germany (2022) and Lotte Museum, Seoul, South Korea (2023).
JR is also the director of four full-length documentaries: Women Are Heroes (2011); the Academy Award-nominated Faces and Places (2017), co-directed by Agnès Varda; the Emmy-nominated Paper & Glue (2021); and most recently, Tehachapi, which premiered at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival.
More about the artist
