Jenny Holzer’s major solo exhibition, J’AI VU, is currently on view at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This exhibition brings together the museum’s major historic collection from the 19th century and the architectural elements with Holzer’s text-based works, inviting viewers to find the familiar artworks anew. Drawing on more than 750 texts excerpted from the museum’s archive and the texts from the historical period covered by its collection, Holzer rearranges and presents them in various media including LEDs, stoneworks, and paintings. The exhibition boasts the most extensive collection of texts Holzer has brought together for an exhibition to date.
 
For the exhibition, Jenny Holzer has rearranged the museum’s history painting room to highlight the theme of war and conflict. Presented alongside war-related works from the collection, Holzer’s Redaction Paintings address the critical issues that have shaped international news in recent years, connecting the problem of violence and power across time. The exhibition includes thirty-four metallic paintings that incorporate declassified documents and other archival texts, where heavily redacted content exposes the paradox of transparency and secrecy of information.

The seventeen stone benches and two columns placed throughout the museum were created by Holzer for this exhibition, taking the museum’s architecture and its permanent collection into account. Most are engraved with texts from the period covered by the museum’s collection between 1848 and 1914, including excerpts from letters and documents by artists such as Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. The works and accompanying texts invite viewers both to appreciate the artwork and to immerse themselves in the history represented in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection.

The LED works extending through four galleries—those dedicated to history painting, naturalism, and symbolism, as well as the Courbet room on the floor below—offer a captivating experience. Animated with colorful streams of text, ÉCRIT (2026) echoes the building’s conversion from a nineteenth-century railway station to a modern museum. The movement of the text reflects the flow of visitors through the station and the galleries, a nod to the building’s past and present. Holzer’s language goes beyond mere commentary on the existing collection, guiding visitors to experience the museum’s history and architecture anew.

In addition, during the opening week of the exhibition and in conjunction with Paris Art Week 2026, Holzer presented light projections titled ÉCLAIRÉ onto the façade of the Musée d’Orsay. Overlooking the Seine River, Holzer’s site-specific light projections illuminated the architecture with textual excerpts drawn from letters of contemporaneous artists such as Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, as well as literary and political commentary. Rising slowly into the night sky, projections offered passersby an immersive experience akin to stepping out of time. Holzer has presented similar projections at major landmarks around the world, including the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Rockefeller Center in New York. Using architecture and natural landscapes as monumental canvases, the artist extends language into public spaces beyond the museum, exploring new ways to engage viewers within the fabric of daily urban life.

The breadth of her approach has resulted in a remarkably diverse assortment of writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revolving around themes such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71; the 1871 Paris Commune; colonialism; activism; anarchism; the world of labor and workers’ strikes; the military, especially conscription, hazing, and corruption; 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 façade, carved into marble and granite, or propelled through space as a stream of light. The exhibition runs through February 21, 2027. Holzer will also present a solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery’s Hanok space on November 19, 2026.