Art center Stroom Den Haag, presents the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands of the renowned versatile French artist Raphael Zarka, on display from May 29 through August 21, 2011. Art exhibition includes sculptures and photographs and Zarka latest production “Gibellina Vecchia”. In his latest short film he scrupulously records the monumental artwork Alberto Burri created in the 1980s on the ruins of the Sicilian town of Gibellina, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968.

French artist Raphael Zarka is fascinated by forgotten spaces and undefined areas, where objects and buildings are reminders of a once promising future. Zarka said that often they are the rusty remnants of an industrial past, which have been transformed into modern ruins. He appropriates that his latest artwork structures, this cultural heritage, and looks into the formal and functional aspects of each object, its history and its ultimate destination. In 2001, he started work on “Les Formes du Repos”, consists of a series of photographs in which the objects, an abandoned monorail, a concrete breakwater, tunnel tubes and such manifest themselves as involuntary sculptures.

This exhibition’s central work is “Gibellina Vecchia” which is not only shows Zarka as a collector of sculptural forms, but also as an essayist and archivist. This short film records Italian abstract painter and sculptor, Alberto Burri’s artwork “Il Grande Cretto” from the 1980s: large slabs of concrete commemorating the streets and shapes of the former town of Gibellina.

Earlier Raphael Zarka exhibition was on display at CAN - Centre http://www.crwenewswire.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=108148d’Art Neuchatel, Switzerland and it is a part of a series of presentations at Stroom that also includes exhibitions by Toby Paterson (2007) and Cyprien Gaillard (2009), urban explorers and skateboarders, contemporaries fascinated by the way in which precise processes and powers shape urban environment.

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