JR Will Launch His Largest Solo Exhibition in the U.K. This Fall

In October 2019, the Brooklyn Museum hosted a monumental solo exhibition featuring an immense body of work by acclaimed French artist, JR. Titled “Chronicles,” the show displayed archival and new original artworks including a sprawling wheat-pasted work that portrayed over 1,000 portraits of New Yorkers captured by the artist himself. Now, London’s Saatchi Gallery is set to bring the exhibition across the pond to present the first major solo exhibition of work by JR in the UK this fall.

The upcoming show will kick off November 13 this year until February 9, 2021. Brooklyn Museum curators Sharon Matt Atkins and Drew Sawyer have teamed up with Saatchi Gallery to chronicle the artist’s prolific career spanning from his early captures of the graffiti scene in Paris to his large-scale installations in major cities across the globe.

Highlights include JR’s 2004-06 project Portrait of a Generation which the artist developed with filmmaker Ladj Ly that featured portraits of children living in the Les Bosquets housing projects in Paris during the 2005 riots as well as the artist’s polarizing 2007 work entitled Face 2 Face that consisted of giant diptych portraits of Israeli and Palestinian people with the same professions.

Laura Uccello, the Saatchi’s director of partnerships, told Artnet News that the exhibition is opening at “a key moment in time in which social engagement and the power of communities have taken center-stage in London and around the world.” Visit Saatchi Gallery’s website to learn more.

Elsewhere in art, Being Seen podcast enlists leading Black artists to create original illustrations.

Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Rd
Chelsea, London SW3 4RY
United Kingdom