Raphaël Zarka

A graduate of Winchester School of Art and École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and a resident at Villa Médicis in 2010-2011, for the past two decades Raphaël Zarka’s extended sculptural practice has encompassed three-dimensional works, painting, drawing, photography and video. He is also the author of three essays on skateboarding and the appropriation of space, published by Éditions B42.

Mining a visual vocabulary inherited from twentieth-century geometric abstraction, he conceives his works through research into applications of geometry in art, science and technology. His interest in movement has led him to imagine “rideable” sculptures, including Cycloïde Piazza (Centre Pompidou, 2024).

Raphaël Zarka is preparing his doctoral thesis under the RADIAN (research in art, design, innovation and architecture in Normandy) programme at École Supérieure d’Arts & Médias Caen and Université de Caen Normandie

Raphaël Zarka intends to use his residency to familiarise himself with the work of Japanese modernist artist Masakazu Horiuti and conduct research into the use of geometry in Japanese art, prior to a joint exhibition with Horiuti which the KYOCERA Museum of Art in Kyoto is planning for 2027. Through Horiuti, Zarka wishes to examine Japanese uses of parallel perspective (axonometry). Since the Renaissance, western representations of geometric spaces have been governed by the rules of a central perspective while in China, India and Japan, artists have observed a parallel perspective in which there is no vanishing point. This use of parallel perspective raises compositional challenges which Japanese artists have experimented with for hundreds of years. From the eighteenth century, by introducing elements of western perspective into the “bird’s eye view” inherited from Chinese painting, Japanese artists formed new opportunities for spatial representation.