The French dealer Emmanuel Perrotin will inaugurate his new gallery in London with a show of over 20 works by the ubiquitous French artist JR. Perrotin’s new space in the capital, which opens 14 March, is based inside the five-star Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair. The exhibition will present two series by JR: Deplacé-e-s (2022-present) and the new project Enfants d’Ouranos (Children of Ouranos). Prices are undisclosed.
For each installation in Deplacé-e-s, JR and his team travelled to a place where families were seeking refuge due to war, climate change, or social instability such as Ukraine, Rwanda and Colombia. “There, with the help of the community, they unfurled an image of a refugee child on a 45-meter-long tarpaulin,” JR says in an online statement.
Photographs of these vast images printed on cotton canvas will be shown in London along with new video works. The exhibition (14 March-19 April) opening marks the anniversary of the deployment (Deplacé-e-s) of Valeriia, a printed tarpaulin depicting a five-year-old refugee that was carried through the centre of Lviv in Ukraine by more than 100 people.
In the Children of Ouranos series, unveiled at Perrotin’s gallery in New York in 2023, JR transfers negatives—taken from photographs of children also caught up in global conflicts or living in refugee camps—onto reclaimed wood. These works are also daubed with black ink so that “the children become glowing silhouettes, evoking classical depictions of divinity”.
New works from this series will be shown in London. “These works take the shape of a photograph because you see silhouettes; it’s like a cast of a photograph. In the end it's between a photograph and a painting,” JR tells The Art Newspaper. “They are images made from negatives; suddenly it looks as if [these children] could be playing on the moon. The idea behind the project is that kids of a certain age do not realise the heaviness of the context.”
JR’s works continue to be timely in the wake of the US election. “Notions of borders and migration permeate my entire body of work. What’s new about Deplacé-e-s is that these ideas are consistently represented from a child’s perspective.
“The impact of Kikito—a 2017 installation on the border between Mexico and the USA—already confirmed this: the portrayal of a child reaches the deepest level of our being,” said the artist in an interview with Arturo Galansino, director of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.
The 350 sq m Perrotin gallery will be located on Brook Mews in what is now Claridge’s Art Space, currently home to a rotating exhibition programme, and next to the Claridge’s Art Space café. The gallery will open following a full refurbishment.
A stalwart of the Parisian and international contemporary art scene, Perrotin opened his first gallery in Paris in 1990. He now also has galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai, but has never before opened a space in the UK capital. Meanwhile, Colony Investment Management took a 60% stake in Perrotin Gallery in 2023.
“It’s important to have a gallery in the British capital,” Perrotin said previously. “We have a long-standing relationship with the UK art scene and collectors. I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to set up the gallery in the right conditions.”
JR has previously shown works in London at Pace Gallery and Lazarides Gallery, and is due to unveil his latest Chronicles work—vast murals capturing the citizens of a particular city—at Gallerie d’Italia in Naples in May.
