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Galleria Continua presents 万花筒 / Kaleidoscope, French artist JR's first solo exhibition at its Beijing location, on view from November 18, 2025 – March 3, 2026. The art exhibition marks JR’s two-decade-long engagement with architecture, public space and collective imagination. Bringing together some of JR's most emblematic projects from around the world, the exhibition unfolds as a visual and conceptual kaleidoscope—where optical illusions, monumental pastings and art installations interact to reshape how urban space is perceived and experienced.
“The exhibition highlights how JR treats architecture not as a frame, but as a living interlocutor—a body that breathes, opens, wounds and heals through shared observation. His works reveal the power of imagery to redefine the relationship between reality and representation, memory and contemporaneity, suggesting that architecture itself can become an important medium to narrate the present moment,” Galleria Continua notes in an official release.
The show’s centrepiece is a monumental, site-specific anamorphic installation titled 通往颐和园之径 / The Pathway to the Summer Palace. The gallery floor opens to 裂开, revealing a passage that cuts through the wall and gradually discloses the image of a pavilion from Beijing’s Summer Palace. “By weaving together the immediacy of contemporary artistic experience and the timeless resonance of an ancient civilisation, the installation transforms spatial perception into a contemplative, immersive journey,” the art gallery elaborates.
On the ground floor, visitors encounter a sequence of large-scale trompe-l’œil works that reinterpret some of Europe’s most iconic façades. These include Punto di Fuga at Palazzo Farnese in Rome, where layered perspectival illusions evoke the spirit of the Renaissance; La Ferita at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, where a cracked façade becomes a metaphor for cultural vulnerability during the pandemic; and Les Falaises du Trocadéro in Paris, which turns the esplanade beneath the Eiffel Tower into a fictive abyss. In dialogue with these architectural interventions, the series Déplacé·e·s presents monumental portraits of refugees and displaced children carried through city streets by hundreds of participants, transforming collective movement into an image of hope and solidarity.
The first floor highlights the contemporary artist’s enduring relationship with paper, presented as both a material for transformation and a vehicle for storytelling. In the central hall, the plaster series Paperblocks includes Omelia Contadina (San Gimignano, 2020), created with director Alice Rohrwacher. The project “enacts a symbolic ‘farmer’s funeral’: villagers carry giant portraits as they process through the fields, using their bodies to speak for the land. This solemn and poetic farewell ceremony honours the increasingly fading traditions of agriculture”, notes Continua.
One side hall presents La Nascita (Milan, 2024), in which a fissured mountain façade is overlaid onto Milan’s Central Station, reflecting on migration, exploration and historical passage. The other features Greetings from Giza (2021), a trompe-l’œil installation that reconfigures the visual alignment of the Pyramid of Khafre, subtly questioning the continuity between ancient monuments and contemporary ways of seeing.
Kaleidoscope concludes on the top floor with a selection of works from The Wrinkles of the City, presented on raw wood. Developed across cities including Cartagena, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Havana, Berlin and Istanbul, the project documents the ‘wrinkles’ of both faces and buildings, turning urban façades into sensitive archives of lived memory and time.
“The exhibition ultimately demonstrates the universal reach of JR’s work, which unites architecture, community and image into a singular language. His works do not merely occupy space: they open it, revealing both its vulnerability and its strength, transforming collective vision into constructive material,” Galleria Continua mentions.
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