Kunsthalle München – Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Theatinerstrasse 8, Munich (Germany)
JR has the largest gallery in the world. He said so himself — it is the walls of the city, any city, every city. I encountered this claim on an October evening at Kunsthalle München, during one of the museum’s regular Afterwork events — the bar open downstairs, music and dancing below, the exhibition available to anyone willing to climb the stairs. It felt like the right way in.
JR began illegally, in Paris, in the early 2000s — pasting photographs of his banlieue friends onto buildings in neighbourhoods the rest of the city preferred not to look at. He was a teenager with a found camera. What followed was four decades of escalating scale and moral ambition, still rooted in the same basic conviction: that a face, enlarged beyond reason and placed where it has no business being, makes people look differently at whoever it belongs to.
The retrospective made that arc visible across multiple rooms — photographs, videos, models, and the enormous wall-filling pastings he is known for. Standing in those rooms, what stayed with me was not the scale but the density. Hundreds of people assembled into collages that covered entire walls, each face distinct, none of them named for the general public. The effect was less documentary than architectural. A wall of human presence that you couldn’t simplify.
Among the works that hit hardest was the documentation of Casa Amarela — the Yellow House JR built in 2009 with local photographer Mauricio Hora at the top of Morro da Providência, Brazil’s oldest favela in Rio. No sponsors, no institution. It became a cultural and educational centre for the community. In 2016, JR added a moon sculpture to the roof. An absurd gesture, and a serious one. In 2026, the house is still there.
The work that stopped me completely was Giants — a trompe-l’oeil portrait of a Mexican toddler named Kikito, pasted on the US side of the border wall at Tecate in 2017, the child appearing to peer over from Mexico. The 3D illusion was precisely realised — the figure seemed to project out from the wall itself, Border Patrol agents visible below. I had not seen this work before that evening. Standing in front of it in a Munich gallery, I needed a moment before I could move on.
JR’s own words, on a wall in the exhibition: “I realised the power that art can have — especially in the darkest of places.”That sentence is not a philosophy. It is something you either recognise from experience or you don’t.
Artène covered JR: Chronicles at, during the event Afterwork KH, October 2022. All photography by Elasse.