Raphaël Zarka was born in Montpellier in 1977, and lives and works in Paris.

Raphaël Zarka is a photographer, sculptor and video artist. He is also the author of several books on skateboarding.
Raphaël Zarka's approach draws on science, industry and philosophy, in a perpetual search for new trajectories. He collects shapes, drawing inspiration from existing forms, which become pretexts for conceiving links between eras, disciplines, practices and ideas.

These shapes may be minimal or geometric, but they remain recognizable when isolated from their context. The artist must then reappropriate and reposition them in his or her own creations. Some forms are linked to sites that the artist has discovered and explored, like an archaeologist. They will be the subject of extremely precise research and documentation. Raphaël Zarka's approach consists in identifying the different types of form, bringing them together and studying them, so that they become objects of culture, disseminated in space and time. Some have been constructed and theorized in past centuries, as models for measuring and understanding the world, weaving a web of mysterious connections between science, art and popular culture.
In this way, Raphaël Zarka identifies analogies between the instruments Galileo devised to study body movements in space, skateboarding devices, minimal sculpture, the endless screw, Archimedes, and the twisted pattern of 16th-century British chimneys.
For each chosen form, the artist creates a series of sculptures reinterpreting it. For example, "Les Prismatiques", a collection that functions as a repertory of forms, features the assembly of 36 frame keys, produced in raw wood, massive and imposing, they can be identified with totems.
Through the practice of replication, the artist reveals several meanings for a single form, as if to play on a collective unconscious that encompasses both 21st-century urban culture and Renaissance humanist inventions.

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Raphaël Zarka sees the Atelier Calder as an experimental space, not simply a studio in which to produce a work of art, but the studio as the first space in which to experience sculpture. During his residency, Raphaël Zarka experimented with and designed a series of modular works, based on the research carried out by the German mathematician and crystallographer Arthur Schönflies (1853 - 1928), which led him to create a series of stone sculptures, one element of which was presented for the studio visit that took place at the end of his stay.

Raphaël Zarka is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris, winner of the Fondation Ricard in 2008 and the Villa Medicis in 2010, and has exhibited in numerous institutions in France and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include Musée régional d'art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon, Sérignan (2013), Les Prismatiques at Galerie Michel Rein (2012), Le Tombeau d'Archimède, Grand Café Centre d'art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire (2011), Principles of Roman Knowledge, Pastificio de Cerere, Rome (2011) and Frac Alsace, Sélestat (2010). He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, More Power, Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Holland, Avec et sans peinture, MACVAL, Vitry sur Seine (2014), La dernière Vague, Friche de la Belle de Mai, Marseille (2013), exhibition of Marcel Duchamp Prize winners, Musée des beaux-arts de Libourne (2013).

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Photos: Corinne Bouvier, Guillaume Blanc