In this new photograph from 2023, acclaimed photographer Jean-François Rauzier presents the latest edition of his long-running museum series with one of the world’s greatest institutions. The Louvre now takes its place alongside the many other museums and galleries the artist has photographed and digitally recreated, including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in 2022. Previously, the artist has studied other storied institutions around the world: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, the National Gallery, London, the Musée d’Orsay and the Petit Palais in Paris.

In this Hyperphoto, the renowned French museum becomes its own vast and elaborate world, its artworks reconfigured as the building blocks for a fantastical new structure. The museum is the artworks it houses. In keeping with previous examples of Rauzier’s works, Louvre captures the feel of the museum’s space and its beloved collection, rather than the landscape of Paris or even the famous exterior where it resides. While dizzyingly vast, Rauzier’s images foster intimacy and memory for those who know and love these important institutions.

In 2002, when Rauzier created his first Hyperphoto, he was already an established photographer and had been searching for a new creative method that would differ considerably from the traditional model. With his Hyperphoto, he strove to capture “the panorama and the macro view all at once, to stop time and to have the possibility of viewing all the details of a static image”.

Jean-François Rauzier is an internationally acclaimed photographer, who has had museum shows in Paris, Moscow, Los Angeles and Washington DC. Ray Waterhouse is his exclusive agent in the USA, UK and Middle East and has shown his work in exhibitions and fairs in New York, Palm Beach, Miami, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi, Maastricht and London, selling over 200 of his ‘Hyperphotos’.

Rauzier’s work transforms reality; it fascinates us with its scale and takes the viewer on a journey through the visible world. Rauzier uses thousands of high-resolution close-ups views and stitches them into his large compositions, maintaining the focus and sharpness of the smallest detail. Rauzier carefully composes each work from elements and images he has collected over many years, working in some ways more like a painter than a photographer, creating his own supernatural man-made world. Using digital technology, he cuts, moves and constructs buildings, gardens, animals, and

many other objects carefully collected during long photographic sessions to inspire a new fantastic landscape, a capricious picture or a baroque masterpiece. He strives to transform the world according to his dreams, wishes and anxieties, and to recreate the magic and secrecy of ancient legends and stories using 21st century media.