2 of 5 Major Summer Gallery Shows in Paris - JR · Les esquisses de la Caverne

JR · Les esquisses de la Caverne

Perrotin Paris · 5 June – 25 July 2026 (View artist project website)

For those of us who missed JR's spectacular public project La Caverne du Pont Neuf - which ran for only two weeks in June, transforming Paris's oldest bridge into an artificial cavern of printed fabric 120 metres long, 20 metres wide, and 18 metres high -the gallery show at Perrotin offered something the public spectacle could not: a quiet space to understand how it was made, and why.

This extraordinarily ambitious project took a year of planning and involved 850 people in the making. It paid tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Pont Neuf Wrapped, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2025.

The visual concept was inspired by the quarries from which the bridge's limestone was originally extracted: the same stone used to build Notre-Dame, the Louvre, and countless Parisian landmarks. By blowing up a historical cave and laying it over the surface of the bridge, JR created a dialogue between deep geological time and the present city, and intentionally renewed the way pedestrians look at a structure they cross without seeing.

Les esquisses is inevitably a scaled-down version of that public event. But it provided exactly the kind of close encounter that large-scale projects deny: photographs shot from multiple angles across the Pont-Neuf, drawings of mineral forms inspired by mountainous and underwater landscapes, cutouts, collages, and compositions - all mounted on zinc plates salvaged from fragments of Parisian rooftops.

The choice of material is deliberate: Paris's own surfaces, repurposed into a record of a project about Paris, binding the individual works into the coherent whole of a single sustained idea. From preparatory sketches to finished multimedia pieces, the gallery show revealed the meticulous intelligence and artistic sensitivity that can be overlooked in the spectacle of JR's public interventions.

Collector note: JR's market has deepened significantly since his Louvre pyramid installation in 2019. The zinc plate works from Les esquisses carry the dual distinction of being independent artworks and records of one of 2026's most discussed public art events.

- reviewed & photos taken by Hilary Tsui, Founder CityTransit Arts | Art Advisor & Curator