JR
Tree and Moon from Women are Heroes, Action dans la Favela Morro da Providencia
2009
Color offset lithograph
64 × 96 cm
Ed. /180
Arianee token ID
728537068
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About the artwork
With Tree and Moon from Women Are Heroes, Action dans la Favela Morro da Providência, created in 2009, JR documents one of the most emblematic interventions from his internationally acclaimed Women Are Heroes project in Rio de Janeiro. The artwork captures the monumental installation of fragmented female eyes across the facades of houses in the Morro da Providência favela, transforming the architecture itself into a collective portrait. Integrated within the dense urban fabric of the hillside neighborhood, the images interact with the irregular geometry of the buildings, the surrounding vegetation, and the daily life of the community. The presence of the tree and the moon within the composition adds a poetic and almost cinematic atmosphere to the scene, reinforcing the contrast between intimacy and monumentality. Through this intervention, JR merges photography, street art, and social engagement, turning public space into a surface for visibility and human connection. The monumental gaze watching over the favela reflects the central intention behind Women Are Heroes: to highlight the dignity, resilience, and stories of women living within marginalized communities around the world. This work perfectly illustrates JR’s ability to transform urban environments into immersive visual narratives where architecture, photography, and collective memory become inseparable.
Expert opinion
This artwork belongs to a pivotal moment in JR’s career, corresponding to the international expansion of the Women Are Heroes project, now widely regarded as one of the artist’s most important and historically significant bodies of work. The Morro da Providência interventions occupy a particularly iconic place within JR’s oeuvre due to the spectacular integration of the portraits into the architecture of the favela itself. Rather than existing as isolated images, the works become fully embedded within the urban landscape, creating compositions that are both socially engaged and visually unforgettable. Prints documenting these historical installations are especially sought after because they preserve the memory of JR’s ephemeral public interventions, projects that played a central role in establishing his international recognition. The combination of strong documentary value, social resonance, and immediately identifiable visual language makes works from this series highly desirable among collectors of contemporary photography and urban art.
About the artist
JR (1983) is a major artist on the contemporary art scene, working at the intersection of photography, street art, cinema and social engagement. He has worked on numerous public projects over the past two decades, and his works have been shown in cities all over the world: on buildings in the slums around Paris, on walls in the Middle East and Africa, and on favelas in Brazil. Recent exhibitions include "Chronicles at the Saatchi Gallery in London" (2021), "The Chronicles of San Francisco at SFMOMA in San Francisco" (2019) and "Momentum, la mécanique de l'épreuve at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris" (2018).
JR is also the director of three feature-length documentaries: Women Are Heroes (2011); the Oscar-nominated Visages Villages (2017), co-directed by Agnès Varda; and most recently, Paper and Glue (2021).
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