Following its opening in Hong Kong in May 2012, Galerie Perrotin is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibitions “Pattern” by JR and “D.R.O.P.” by Peter Zimmermann. The exhibitions, which will showcase new works by the artists, will take place simultaneously.
French artist JR has also conceptualized a Hong Kong project which will uniquely see 16 large-scale photos of human faces pasted in an outdoor location in Hong Kong, which will be revealed during the exhibition opening on 18th September. This outdoor installation, co-presented by Galerie Perrotin and the Consulate General of France, will form part of the artist’s global art project INSIDE OUT that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Through the use black and white photographic portraits the public is challenged to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world.
JR creates monumental photographs that he pastes around the world, infiltrating in urban life anonymous portraits, witnesses of the present and the past - “Women are Heroes” in Rio de Janeiro, Jaipur, Nairobi (2008- 2010), which gave its title to JR’s movie that was selected at the Festival de Cannes in 2010 ; «The Wrinkles of the City» in Cartagena, Shanghai, Los Angeles (2008-2011).
JR reveals art by action, displaying his gigantic prints over the suburban buildings of Paris, on walls in the Middle East or in the United States, in favelas in Brazil or on broken bridges in Africa, on the facade of Tate Modern in London.
He received the prestigious TED Prize in 2011 that offered him to make a “wish to change the world”. With the INSIDE OUT Project, JR brings together and prints portraits, as messages of personal identity (www.insideoutproject.net). On this occasion, photobooths printing large- scale self-portraits were seen during the summer in various places of the globe, including Paris (Centre Pompidou, Galerie Perrotin), Arles (Ren- contres de la Photographie), Tel Aviv or Ramallah, and now Hong Kong at Galerie Perrotin. The exhibition “Pattern” will display for the first time photographs and wood panels from the INSIDE OUT series. Will also be revealed JR’s very first experimentation with cast aluminum, sculptures in a crinkled effect, featuring the dot patterned eyes, characteristic of INSIDE OUT imagery.
Committed art, street art, participative art, ephemeral art, beyond any category, JR makes us reflect by inviting on stage anonymous heroes, displaying the multiple faces of humanity.
Peter Zimmermann borrows the knowledge of old masters like Cranach and Dürer in superimposing layers of paint to provide a subtly transpar- ent effect. Oil painting is replaced here by epoxy resin in which acrylic pigments are randomly inserted. Peter Zimmermann also reinvents Action Painting, giving it a post-modern twist. The abstract motifs that have been present in his works since the end of the 1990s spring paradoxically from figurative representations. He has for some time subjected the world of art and society in general to a critical semiological reading through art book or philosophy enlarged cover paintings and fictional publicity stands. Thanks to computer tools and dithering, the artist deforms visuals, texts and signs coming from his own inventory of sundry images that recall the atlases of Gerhard Richter and Warburg. The digital files obtained in this way, which are the matrices of his future paintings, are subsequently transfigured. Peter Zimmermann’s «tactile» paintings possess a luminosity and unique internal sensuality issuing from a complex technique.
His works have been exhibited in numerous international exhibitions, including the Foundation Bruxelles in Belgium, Kunsthalle Nürnberg in Nuremburg in Germany, the 2007 Moscow Biennale, the 1999 Liverpool Biennale in England, and 1993 Venice Biennial in Italy, among others. They belong to the most important Public Collections : Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France ; Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, France ; Centre Georges Pompidou (Amis du musée national d’Art moderne), Paris, France ; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France ; Museum Moderner Kunst, Frankfurt/Main, Germany ; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany ; Museion, Bolzano, Italy ; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA ; New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, New Orleans, USA ; Museum of Modern Art, New York ; USA, New York Public Library, New
York, USA ; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, USA etc.
