JR, 1983

Artist Statement

Title: 1983

Year: 1983

Tears of a selection of 1983 TIME covers.

Bio:

JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors, from the suburbs of Paris to the slums of Brazil to the streets of New York, pasting huge portraits of anonymous people, from Kibera to Istanbul, from Los Angeles to Shanghai. In 2011 he received the TED Prize, after which he created Inside Out, an global participatory art project that allows people worldwide to get their picture taken and paste it to support an idea and share their experience – as of January 2022, over 450,000 people from more than 141 countries have participated, through mail or gigantic photobooths. His recent projects include a large-scale pasting in a maximum security prison in California, a TIME Magazine cover about Guns in America, a video mural including 1,200 people presented at SFMOMA, a collaboration with New York City Ballet, an Academy Award Nominated feature documentary co-directed with Nouvelle Vague legend Agnès Varda, a huge installation on the Pantheon in Paris, the pasting of a container ship, the pyramid of the Louvre, a monumental mural “à la Diego Rivera” in the suburbs of Paris, giant scaffolding installations at the 2016 Rio Olympics, an exhibition on the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island, a social restaurant for homeless and refugees in Paris or a gigantic installation at the US-Mexico border fence. As he remains anonymous, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/interpreter. That is what JR’s work is about, raising questions.

@JRart | @jr

JR invited Charlotte Abramow to TIMEPieces. Their work is inspired by the year 1983.

Contact us at letters@time.com.