Exhibition guide

“Les Sketches de la Caverne”, JR’s fifth exhibition at the Perrotin gallery in Paris (3rd), opens from June 5 to July 25, at the very moment when the artist, with unusual audacity, is creating his monumental Caverne du Pont Neuf in Paris. This art project in public space, of indisputable originality and already legendary, will have consisted of making for a time the Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, a footbridge transformed into a grotto of printed canvas 120 meters long, 20 meters wide and 18 meters high, an immersive installation that the public has every leisure to contemplate or cross twenty-four hours a day, for almost a month.

Visit details

  • Dates: From Friday June 5, 2026 to Saturday July 25, 2026: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
  • Venue: Galerie Perrotin, 76 rue de Turenne, Paris
  • Price: free
  • Audience: All audiences
  • Source: Event page

About the exhibition

Through artistic magic, a historic functional facility in the City of Lights becomes a tunnel resembling a mountain tunnel that is brought to life by music, entrusted to Thomas Bangalter, ex-Daft Punk, as well as an interactive tour program that sharpens the senses. This, recovered from cut-outs of Parisian roofs and presented as is, bearing the marks and imprint of time, gives its contextual turn to these creations, their stricto sensu “Parisian” touch. Photography, first. “It’s a step towards the unknown,” says the artist, “a journey in itself. To this gesture of collage and montage which evokes the way of working, through hisCombine PaJR “shoots” the Pont-Neuf from different angles and selects the images. Homage, forty-one years later, to the Pont-Neuf packaged by Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1985), La Caverne du Pont Neuf is part of the tradition of the great trompe-l'oeil created by JR in recent years at the Louvre, the Paris Opera or even on the facades of Italian palaces. Drawing, then. I conceived the crossing of the Caverne as an experience where the full and the empty will live in balance."

With a desired thematic coherence, the plastic works presented at the gallery concomitantly with the physical provision, for the benefit of the public, of the revamped Pont-Neuf are all preparatory drawings of the project, like the numerous images that Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced before their creations. Inspired by the theme of the Platonic cave and the debates on perception (what is seeing? does seeing arouse the feeling of truth or imagination?), these proposals encourage us to meditate on pretense, illusion and the formidable powers of artifice of art, capable of transforming the world, of projecting our consciousness into other, new, unheard-of universes, as well as of stimulating, with regard to its public component, the The artist, in the workshop, draws then cuts the mineral shapes that the real Caverne du Pont Neuf will adopt, drawing inspiration from landscape elements seen and gleaned from various mountainous or underwater sites: in doing so he prefigures its final appearance. Both prospective and descriptive, these are the very foundation of the project, a history of its factual and step-by-step development, both the result of mental writing and diligent work of design and layout.

Drawing, zinc, photo and collageThese preparatory sketches, which have become so many works of art in themselves, are developed using the same technique bringing into line living together.

A guaranteed change of sceneryLa Caverne du Pont Neuf as designed by JR, transforms the Parisian urban landscape. Another medium, zinc plates used to collect, as a support, both photographs and drawings, by collage. has several mediums.