JR valuation
Pastes photographs of people at building scale, on walls, rooftops and the fences between countries.
JR was born in Paris in 1983 and began as a graffiti writer, finding a camera on the Metro at seventeen.
What a work by JR is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
JR was born in Paris in 1983 and began as a graffiti writer, finding a camera on the Metro at seventeen. The practice that followed is photography used as street art: enormous black and white portraits pasted onto buildings, favela facades in Rio, the wall between Israel and the West Bank, the sides of trains, a paper eye on a rooftop, and the Inside Out project, which has printed and pasted portraits of over four hundred thousand people worldwide. He installed a paper trompe l'oeil over the Louvre pyramid and has kept his identity behind sunglasses and a hat throughout. He won the TED Prize in 2011.
The street works are temporary by design and are not what trades. What does is the editioned photographic and printed work — pigment prints, screenprints, works mounted on wood, and the large-scale collaged pieces — usually signed and numbered, sometimes hand-finished, and issued through galleries and named publishers. Editions vary widely in size between images, and the same photograph often exists in several formats, so the edition and the format together identify the work. The certificate is the normal proof and should accompany a sale.
At a glance
- Born
- 1983, Paris
Inside Out, the Louvre and Faces Places
JR won the TED Prize for 2011 and used it to start the Inside Out Project, in which people send in portraits that are printed as posters and pasted up in their own communities. In 2016 he made the Louvre pyramid appear to vanish with an anamorphic image, and in 2019 he covered the courtyard around it with a paper illusion of an excavated crater, which visitors had torn to shreds within a day. Faces Places, the film he made with Agnès Varda, followed in 2017.
The street works are pasted paper, meant to tear and fade, so what an owner holds is a studio work or an edition. The same photograph may appear as a pasted work, a print and a framed collage, and the title and project named on the certificate are what identify which it is.
Portraits of a Generation, Face 2 Face and Ellis Island
JR's first sustained project, Portraits of a Generation, was made between 2004 and 2006 with young people from the Les Bosquets estate outside Paris, at the centre of the 2005 riots. The huge portraits went up illegally before the City of Paris pasted them on its own buildings. Face 2 Face followed in 2007, with portraits of Israelis and Palestinians who do the same jobs pasted side by side in eight cities on both sides of the separation barrier, and in 2008 Women Are Heroes, portraits of women in places marked by conflict.
In 2014 he covered the Panthéon in Paris with 4,000 faces and installed Unframed in the abandoned hospital on Ellis Island, the setting for his short film Ellis of 2015, starring Robert De Niro. During the Rio Olympics in 2016 he raised giant images of athletes on scaffolding across the city, and in 2019 he made a courtyard mural with prisoners at Tehachapi in California, photographed from a drone. Time included him among its hundred most influential people in 2018.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
