JR

Life and work

Jean Rene, who signs his work JR, was born in Paris in 1983. He began as a teenage graffiti writer on Paris rooftops and metro trains, and after finding a camera in the metro he started photographing what he and his friends painted. At seventeen he began pasting photocopies of those photographs onto outdoor walls, in what he called his own sidewalk gallery exhibitions. Portraits of a Generation, made with young people from the housing estates on the eastern edge of Paris, moved from illegal pasting to official commission when the city put his images up on its own buildings. Face 2 Face set enormous portraits of Israelis and Palestinians opposite one another across the separation barrier. Women Are Heroes carried the same method to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya, Brazil, India and Cambodia. He won the TED Prize in 2011 and spent the award on Inside Out, a participatory project that has printed and shipped portraits to communities in more than a hundred countries. In 2016 he made the glass pyramid of the Louvre appear to vanish behind one of his anamorphic images. He calls himself an urban artivist, and describes the street as the largest art gallery in the world.

The Kikito lithograph

The LLB lot is Kikito. In 2017 JR raised a scaffold on the Mexican side of the border at Tecate carrying an enlarged photograph of a local toddler, so that from the American side the child appeared to be leaning over the fence and peering into the United States. On the last day of the installation a picnic was held across the fence, with food passed through it and the two eyes of a young undocumented immigrant printed on either side, so that seen from above the tables read as one long shared table. The published lithograph from that image is the version most collectors own, and it is among the most recognisable subjects in his output.

Disciplines and how they differ

Almost nothing that sells under this name is a wall. The pastings are temporary by design, and the artist has said that the images, like life, are ephemeral. What trades instead falls into three registers. At the base sit the signed lithographs and offset editions published in runs of a few hundred, of which the LLB lot is one. Above them sit photographic prints from the numbered series, issued in editions of a handful. At the top sit the very large works, colour photographs mounted on Plexiglas or pasted paper laid onto wood panel, made at something close to the scale of the installations themselves.

Market position

The registers price far apart. At Bonhams in London in January 2011, Street Kid, Favela Morro da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, a paper on wood panel work signed and stamped to a label on the reverse and previously with Lazarides Gallery, made GBP 31,200. At Phillips in London in December 2017, a colour photograph on Plexiglas from the 28 Millimetres series, numbered two from an edition of three plus two artist's proofs, made GBP 38,750. Each figure includes the buyer's premium as the house prints it. A signed lithograph from a published edition sits several orders below that, in the low hundreds, which is the band the LLB result falls in.

What a seller should have ready

Photograph the sheet complete with all four margins, and the inscription line close enough to read. Expect a pencil signature, and on the numbered editions a number at the lower left. Record the sheet size in centimetres and the edition size exactly as written. For the photographic works, photograph the reverse in full: the label carrying the signature and the studio stamp is where the identifying information sits, as the Bonhams lot shows. Keep the purchase record from the publisher or the representing gallery, since these editions were largely sold direct and a dated release places a sheet quickly. The lithographs are issued rolled, so a set curl is normal and reversible, while pin holes and corner creases are read hard.