The French artist JR has transformed Rio de Janeiro’s skyline ahead of the Olympics opening ceremony on Friday (5 August). In two giant public installations the artist has depicted athletes in action—one diving into the sea in Barra da Tijuca and the second high jumping over a high-rise residential building in the Flamengo neighbourhood.
The work on top of the Hilton Santos building is 20 metres high and has been in progress since June. It honours the high-jumper Mohamed Younes Idriss, a 27-year-old athlete from Sudan who now lives and trains in Cologne, Germany. Idriss will not be participating in the games, however. “He missed out on qualification for the 2016 Rio Olympics but he is there somehow,” JR writes in an Instagram post. The installation will be on show until 28 August.
Using what JR describes as a completely new technique, the installations have been made by stretching printed fabric over scaffolding structures to give a translucent effect to the photographic images. The artist says he has been working on the technique for almost a year.
This is JR's second major project in Rio de Janeiro. He brought his Women are Heroes project to the city in 2008, pasting photos of women’s faces on the walls of a favela. In May this year, the artist made headlines by covering one of the glass sides of the Musée du Louvre's pyramid with a black-and-white photograph, giving the illusion that it had temporarily disappeared.