Biography

Raphaël Zarka was born in 1977 in Montpellier, France.

Lives and works in Paris, France.

 

Raphaël Zarka graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and from the Winchester School of Art (UK). His work in the expanded field of sculpture also includes photography, drawing and writing. He is notably the author of three essays on forms and spaces of skateboarding, in which he puts forward a transversal and transdisciplinary approach to popular cultures.

 

Raphaël Zarka belongs to a generation of artists who have quietly renewed the relationships between art and knowledge. An erudite collector of stories, facts and images, the results of his various investigationstouching the surface of objects in an allusive or subliminal mannerare crystallised in his sculptures. A concrete and sensitive way of annexing related or heterogeneous areas to art while remaining within the regime of sculpture. While the cognitive sources that suffuse his work are not always explicit in the object itself, they form a tangled and personal network of referents discussed in the numerous texts and interviews accompanying his work. The artist’s interest in skateboarding is well known, a sport to which he has devoted several artworks and three erudite studies. It seems clear that he is interested in skateboarding not so much as a culture, a technique, or a subject as a relational, economic, and ethical model. A specific register of action (and of inertia) applied to knowledge and to artistic production.” (Guillaume Désanges)

 

His work is part of many French institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Val-de-Marne in Vitry as well as in six French regional contemporary art collections (FRAC) and at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP). His works also feature in the international collections such as the ones of the Mudam in Luxembourg (MUDAM), BPS22 - Musée d'art de la Province de Hainaut, Charleroi, the Museum of New and Old Art in Hobart (MONA), Tasmania, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris/San Francisco, and the Zabludowicz collection in London, amongst others.

Works
  • Raphaël Zarka, Le second cénotaphe d'Archimède, 2012
    Le second cénotaphe d'Archimède, 2012
  • Raphaël Zarka, Abstraction Gnomonique 01, 2020
    Abstraction Gnomonique 01, 2020
  • Raphaël Zarka, Abstraction Gnomonique 11, 2020
    Abstraction Gnomonique 11, 2020
  • Raphaël Zarka, Adler nº1, 2022
    Adler nº1, 2022
  • Raphaël Zarka, Floris nº1, 2022
    Floris nº1, 2022
  • Raphaël Zarka, L'Oisellerie, 2022
    L'Oisellerie, 2022
  • Raphaël Zarka, Lavaur nº1, 2022
    Lavaur nº1, 2022
  • Raphaël Zarka, Lescours nº1, 2022
    Lescours nº1, 2022
  • Raphaël Zarka, L’Oisellerie nº1, 2022
    L’Oisellerie nº1, 2022
  • Raphaël Zarka, Bois Gnomonique n°10, 2023
    Bois Gnomonique n°10, 2023
  • Raphaël Zarka, Rampe Cycloïdale n°2, 2024
    Rampe Cycloïdale n°2, 2024
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