Jenny Holzer Rewrites Musée d’Orsay’s History with “J’ai Vu”

From 20 October to 21 February 2027, Jenny Holzer is painting Musée d’Orsay’s walls with her light installations. “J’ai Vu”, conceived for and with the Musée d’Orsay, offers text fragments from the museum’s archive. It comprises monumental installations, projections onto the former railway station’s historic facade, engravings on stone benches and columns in variegated marbles, and luminous electronic displays.

The exhibition takes a variety of forms, beginning with light projections on the museum’s facade along the Seine. This takes place during the show’s opening week, from October 18 to 22. The projections are excerpts selected by Holzer from a range of sources, from artists’ letters found in the museum’s archive to contemporaneous literary and political commentary.

Inside Musée D’Orsay’s walls

Inside the museum, an animated LED sign flashes colorful streams of text drawn from the Musée d’Orsay’s collection. It extends through four galleries, those dedicated to history painting, naturalism, and symbolism, as well as the Courbet room. The illuminated artwork echoes the building’s conversion from nineteenth-century railway station to modern museum. The custom program traversing the space mirrors the bustle of visitors, in a nod to the Gare d’Orsay’s original function.

An artist-curated presentation unfolds throughout the history painting room. The thematic focus is war, in the spirit of Jenny Holzer’s practice of creating memorials and antimemorials. Ordinarily dedicated to an assortment of historical scenes, this gallery now centers on conflict. It combines war-related works from the collection with a selection of paintings by Holzer concerning recent international battles.

The installation continues in a gallery nearby overlooking the Seine with me metallic paintings based on declassified government documents.

The exhibition also features nineteen stoneworks, including seventeen benches and two columns, inspired by the Orsay’s pedestals. Holzer installed these original sculptures, which she created for this occasion, throughout the galleries and ground-floor spaces. Most of them are engraved with texts from the period covered by the museum’s collection, from 1848 to 1914.

A journey through 19th and 20th-century political History

With more than 750 unique texts drawn from 424 sources and 73 authors, “J’ai vu” is Jenny Holzer’s largest selection of texts for an exhibition to date. It includes a diverse assortment of writings from the late nineteenth as well as early twentieth centuries. The texts cover themes such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the 1871 Paris Commune. In addition, it addresses the topics of colonialism, activism; anarchism, labor, the military, especially conscription, hazing, and corruption. Additionally, it treats Baron Haussmann and living conditions in Paris, art criticism, and artists’ correspondence.

This plurality of voices takes on particular resonance when projected at monumental scale onto the museum’s facade, carved into marble and granite, or propelled through space as a stream of light. In returning to the primary documents of the period represented by the Musée d’Orsay’s collection, Holzer paints a portrait of an era via different voices, anecdotes, and points of view.

The artist

For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her ideas, arguments and sorrows in public spaces and at major international exhibitions. She has used mediums such as T-shirts, plaques or electronic sign to write her messages. From street posters in New York in the 1970s to recent light projections on landscapes and architecture, her practice counters ignorance and violence with humour, kindness as well as courage.

Jenny Holzer received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award in 1996, the rank of Officer of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2016, as well as the US State Department’s International Medal of Arts in 2017. Additionally, in 2024, she was named among the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. She holds honorary degrees from Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as The New School and Smith College. She lives and works in New York.

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