JR (French, b. 1983) is a street artist and photographer who pastes large black-and-white portraits onto buildings, favelas, border fences and walls around the world.,Working between Paris and New York, he combines photography, public art and filmmaking, involving the people he photographs directly in each project.He describes his practice as “infiltrating art”, capable of reaching an audience beyond museum visitors.
In 2008 JR began Women Are Heroes, pasting portraits of women from conflict zones onto trucks, buildings and temporary structures, starting in Sierra Leone and continuing in Liberia, Kenya, Cambodia, India, Brazil and France. One photograph, 28 Millimètres, Women are Heroes, Rispah Atemba, Sierra Leone, 2008, shows a smiling woman resting her head on her hands despite the civil war her country had just come through.After receiving the TED Prize in 2011, JR launched Inside Out Project, which invites people worldwide to have their portraits taken and pasted in public spaces in support of a cause.
In 2016 the Louvre invited JR to wrap its glass pyramid in photographs of the surrounding palace, making it appear to vanish in an anamorphic illusion.,From 2019 to 2020 he used a similar approach at a maximum-security prison in Tehachapi, California, where he photographed inmates and pasted their portraits in the prison yard, then wheat-pasted an image of the surrounding mountains onto the prison's high walls. JR co-directed the documentary Faces, Places with Agnès Varda in 2017, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2018. Surveys of his work have been held at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2019 and the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2021, under the title “JR: Chronicles”.
In 2021 JR released his debut NFT collection, Greetings from Giza, made up of 4,591 pieces each depicting a fragment of the pyramids at Giza, launched via HENI.
