An art installation has created the optical illusion that the French capital’s Eiffel Tower is perched precariously over a rocky ravine. The artwork, by the artist who uses the pseudonym JR, is located at Place du Trocadéro near the Palais de Chaillot.
The new work tricks the eye to believe that Effiel Tower is perched on a pair of cliffs. When a visitor stands in the right spot, the artwork in the foreground and the tower in the background line up with each other, and the illusion is created. Large queues of people keen to take pictures jumping over the would-be chasm have formed near the black-and-white photomontage.
The Paris piece launches on the eve of the mid-career survey, JR Chronicles, billed as the largest solo museum exhibition to date of the artist’s works, which is due to launch at the Saatchi Gallery in London next month (4 June-3 October).
The survey is an expanded version of an exhibition shown at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2019. The show is due to include Tehachapi (2019) which charts a collaborative project co-created with the inmates of a maximum-security prison in California (JR pasted 338 strips of paper on the prison yard floor, creating a vast mural of prisoners and staff that is visible from above).
In March, JR unveiled a work on the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence which created an illusion of a 28m tall crack in the building which shows the gallery in half. The art installation was titled La Ferita.
Other notable works by the artist include The Secret of the Great Pyramid (2019), a large-scale illusory collaborative piece created to mark the 30th anniversary of the Louvre Pyramid. JR also helped coordinate the “Art and Image” project at the École Kourtrajmé, a cinema school founded by his longtime collaborator and film director Ladj Ly.