“You go back to the essence of life,” he said. “When you look at those artworks, you actually don’t know if it’s a painting, if it’s a photograph, if it’s on the moon. You lose all sense of context.”
For the Parrish director, Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, who invited JR to adapt multiple figures from “Les Enfants d’Ouranos” into the composition for the museum’s facade, their ambiguity is their strength. “We see these children as more universal than anchoring them to a particular conflict zone,” she said.
Since the Parrish began installing work on its exterior facing the highway — the first was a video piece by Clifford Ross in 2017 — “our facade is one of our most important galleries,” Ms. Ramírez-Montagut, the director, said. “I want to signal the fact that we will be working with our communities that are underrepresented and underserved, which is something JR does with incredible mastery and compassion. He builds bridges. It’s inspiring and optimistic.”
JR’s engagement with timely issues and his inclusiveness make it easy for people to love his work, said Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum. There, in 2019, he had his first major museum exhibition in North America, a career survey that traveled to London; Groningen, Netherlands; and Munich and opens at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul on May 3.
In the Parrish installation, “the light is really an illumination from the children,” Ms. Pasternak said. “There’s something very direct, maybe obvious, but also very beautiful about that — the idea of childhood, joy, the sense of play, their light shining and guiding us.”
She added that people won’t be able to not see it when they’re driving by the Parrish. “It forces you to think about the plight of others,” she said, “while you’re going off onto your glamorous weekend in the Hamptons.”
