JR - Los Surcos de la Ciudad, Marino Saura Oton, Cartagena, Espagne (2008)

Los Surcos de la Ciudad — Marino Saura Oton, Cartagena, Espagne (2008) is a lithograph from JR's celebrated Los Surcos de la Ciudad (The Furrows of the City) project — one of the most significant bodies of work produced by the anonymous French artist whose large-scale photographic interventions on the walls of cities across the world have made him one of the most globally recognised and institutionally acclaimed artists of his generation, recipient of the TED Prize in 2011.

The image presents a close-up portrait of an elderly man — Marino Saura Oton, photographed in Cartagena, Spain — his deeply lined face filling the lower half of the composition with the dignity and weathered authority that JR consistently finds in the faces of those whom urban environments render invisible. Above and behind him, a rusted industrial wall curves upward, a metal staircase ascending its surface in a diagonal that bisects the image and rhymes formally with the lines of the man's face — the furrows of the city and the furrows of the human face made one, the built environment and the lived life occupying the same visual register.

The Los Surcos de la Ciudad project — "The Furrows of the City" — was JR's intervention in Cartagena, Spain, in which he photographed elderly residents and pasted their monumental portraits onto the walls of the buildings in which they lived, making the architecture bear witness to the people it contained. The project belongs to JR's broader practice of using the street as a gallery and portraiture as a political act — insisting on the visibility and dignity of those whom institutional culture overlooks.

Printed as a 7-colour lithograph on a Marinoni machine — the historic mechanical press used for large-format colour lithography, associated with the highest standards of French print production — this impression is numbered 49/250 and signed by the artist with his characteristic blue stamp signature. Unframed and in excellent condition.