JR, "Horizons"

by Michael Shaw

Perrotin, Los Angeles, California

Continuing through April 25, 2026

JR, “The Wrinkles of the City, Istanbul, Hasan Saltik Eye, Turkey,” 2015. All images courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Los Angeles.

Having never previously seen JR’s work in person, taking in his mini-retrospective, titled “Horizons,” I’ve still fallen short of experiencing the quintessential JR: a large-scale black & white mural. Most typically these are photographs of an individuals’ eyes, sometimes full face, looking directly out at the viewer, ideally several of them clustered together.

Made with “wheat past[e] and gigantic mono photographs” the media itself is about as unsophisticated as it gets, but not so the results. One of several murals reproduced here, as a now upscale framed photo, features the party-space host Jim Budman’s eyes and brow glaring out at us in the Venice neighborhood of L.A. Another is of a loving older couple resting atop a roof in downtown L.A., presumably only visible if you were in a higher rise building nearby, or in a helicopter. Both were part of his “Wrinkles of the City” series from 2011. As it quickly becomes clear, these murals were designed as much for reproduction — including, naturally, on social media — as for the in situ experience.

JR, “Giants, Kikito, October 7th 6:40 p.m, Tecate, Border Mexico-USA,” 2017.

JR had the foresight, the ambition, and even the community-engagement skills to launch his iconic cropped portraits, first in his native Paris but soon into urban landscapes around the world, with a high virality quotient. My introduction to his work (from afar) was a powerful collection of eyes, along with partial and occasional full faces, spread across a favela in Rio de Janeiro, an action he called “Women Are Heroes” (2008). Fast forward to “Horizon,” which samples various works from the last 15 years, and those earliest gestures of insurgency and rebellion have been diluted, even neutered, by the realities of the market and JR’s ascendency in it.

Like Bansky, JR’s work compresses the divide between street art and high art, and he’s become nearly as well-known as Banksy in the process. Another quality these two artists share is their accessibility. It just isn’t possible to have that level of notoriety without being both easily digestible and inducing a degree of sympatico with a mass viewing audience. Two projects from “Horizons” stand out for comparison in their divergence: one for its use of the human figure, the other without. The former, “Giants, Kikito” (2017) was produced at the U.S.-Mexico border in the city of Tecate. This black-and-white photo-mural cutout is of a towering toddler peering over the border fence, his fingers appearing to rest upon it. One of the exhibition’s photos embraces this illusion, while another exposes the mural’s intervention: an aerial photo showing the thoroughly scaffolded structure Kikito was built onto, and its actual proximity a good 50-or-so feet from the border fence so as to capture that ideal scale. Additionally, there’s an eight-foot-tall ink-on-wood-fencing object, with roughly the same perspective of the 1st photo, though in this version we see a man atop the scaffolding, just to Kikito’s right. An adorable child (whom JR met with his family in Tecacte) bridging the literal and symbolic gaps of this perpetual geopolitical showdown, melts our hearts and presumably melts this arbitrary borderline along with it. Using a toddler as opposed to an adult is a far narrower tightrope to walk.

JR, “Giants, “Death Valley, Billboard, March 5, 2017, 3.03 pm, California, USA,”, 2017, color photograph, matte Plexiglas, aluminum, wood, 42 15/16 x 68 1/2”.

Nearby is “Giants, Death Valley, Billboard, Mars 5, 2017, 9:46 am, California, USA” (2017), a unique framed color photo of a black-and-white billboard of a section of mountains, which is in turn a trompe l'oeil image that mimics an actual stretch of the Death Valley mountainside behind it. The piece, rather than being an outlier in JR’s work due to the landscape subject — and which owes at least a little something to the legendary conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson — is part of a significant subset of such projects. It came out of a collaboration with the popular band Arcade Fire for one of their albums. This is where one may be inclined to slam JR for selling out, and yet, at the same time, what big-time photographer worth their salt doesn’t manage to cash in on their commercial bankability? It’s really just a framing issue (literally and figuratively): Arcade Fire, in addition to being popular is well respected, and one could just as well say that the band is providing the artist with a creative opportunity as vice versa. At least compared with JR’s other tromp l’oeil work, and despite its conceptual backbone, “Giants” lacks the populist charm of its human-spun counterparts.

JR, “Tehachapi, The Road, Anamorphosis, #1, USA,” 2022, color print, mounted on dibond, matte Plexiglas, 40 9/16 x 60 1/4”.

Another notable project documented here is his work with Tehachapi, a prison a couple hours north of L.A. in Kern County, officially known as California Correctional Institution. A video screening shows JR photographing some of the inmates from above on a rolling scaffold, interspersed with individual inmates telling some of their stories, and his meeting with the inmates as a group. These portraits (only shown in the video, which is not included in the exhibition), cast the inmates as saintly and give them a wide breadth of humanity. To describe them as ‘repentant’ would be the obvious characterization, but there’s room for various interpretations. One unique photo (the fact that more than half the photos in “Horizons” are unique as opposed to editions is a noteworthy choice), “Tehachapi, The Road, Anamorphosis, #1, USA,” (2022), was a collaboration with the inmates, who wheat-pasted the exterior walls of the prison with an image of a road leading out of it. The actual windows of the prison become portals thanks to the easel-like armatures in the mural, a gesture that gives the prisoners a voice, if only a symbolic one. The community building and direct social contact JR (and his team) engaged in is incredibly admirable and, going back to bridging street art and high art, this is, in a sense, bridging the wealth of the high art world with the social and financial powerlessness of prisoners; not in the same place, of course, but the overlap alone is commendable.

JR has long since transcended his graffiti-artist roots, and now it’s hard not to see him as suffering from a savior syndrome. It’s not to say that artists with means cannot or should not give back to the community, spread the wealth, etc. Of course not. It’s that when they do, it’s often all we can think about. And that’s the takeaway from these experiences, these activations, of “Horizons.” Their power and consequence can only be moved so far from their original context before they become shells of themselves.

Michael Shaw is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. His work was recently included in the exhibition “Meshuganah” at A Very Serious Gallery in Chicago, as well as the exhibitions “Sociality” at LA Tate gallery in 2023, and It’s My House! at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, in 2022, and has been exhibited throughout the U.S. He is the recipient of a Culver City Arts grant in 2023, a Puffin Foundation Grant and the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant in 2022, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Quick Grant in 2021, and the New Student Award at Hunter College, where he received his MFA.

Visit Michael Shaw’s website.