Julien de Casabianca is a visual artist, filmmaker and founder of the Outings Project – a global participatory art project that embellishes the streets with portraits taken from classical paintings.
What began as a prank upon seeing Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière at the Louvre (“I wanted to help her get out, like Prince Charming trying to rescue the girl in the museum castle” says de Casabianca) has evolved into a full-time mission to merge the perceptions of canonical and street art, while punctuating neglected spaces with images of beauty.
Each individual portrait appears as if liberated from their museum setting, thus highlighting the strategies employed by street artists in the democratization of art through questioning the received authority of cultural institutions.