Les esquisses de la caverne

Coinciding with his monumental public art project in Paris, Galerie Perrotin presents Les Esquisses de la Caverne, JR's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition runs concurrently with La Caverne du Pont Neuf, an immersive installation that temporarily transforms Paris’s oldest bridge into a 120-meter-long cave of printed fabric, complete with a sensory program and music by Thomas Bangalter. Paying homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 1985 wrapped bridge, JR’s public project uses Plato’s allegory of the cave to explore the nature of illusion and art’s power to reshape the urban landscape, fostering a collective, shared experience for twenty-four hours a day.

The gallery exhibition showcases the complex preparatory sketches that form the foundation of this massive undertaking. In a process reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s "Combine Paintings," JR merges photography, drawing, and deliberate paper-crumpling into multi-dimensional collages mounted onto weathered zinc sheets salvaged from Parisian rooftops. Alongside these structural blueprints, the show features his Dé-compositions—private-scale photographs and lithographs centered on the juxtaposition of visual fragments. Through these works, JR seeks to recompose the isolated elements of a fragmented world, orchestrating them into a visual narrative of reconciliation and harmony.