Raphaël Zarka

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 investigations—touching the surface of objects in an allusive or subliminal manner—are 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.