Raphaël Zarka — Cycloïde Piazza — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 22 → September 15, 2024

For the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the Centre Pompidou is presenting a new sculpture by French artist Raphaël Zarka (born in 1977 in Montpellier), made in collaboration with architect Jean-Benoît Vétillard and designed especially for the Piazza. In the exact same location that previously hosted the large mobile titled Horizontal by Calder, Le Pouce by César and Le Pot Doré by Jean-Pierre Raynaud, it is now the turn of Cycloïd Piazza to be installed in front of the Centre Pompidou, from 22 June 2024.

At the crossroads between art, sport and the scientific study of movement, Cycloïd Piazza is a monumental sculpture with the particularity of being entirely “skateable”, for both amateurs and professionals. Superbly complex and immediately accessible, this work creates a dialogue, or even friction, between the worlds of skating, art, the history of art and the science of curvature.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Galileo and his successors studied falling bodies by rolling marbles down an inclined groove. Raphaël Zarka reuses the form and principles of some of the apparatus that featured in all the experimental physics laboratories of the Classical era and adapts them to skateboarding. It was also the astronomer Galileo who, in 1599, named the curve of fastest descent “cycloid”, which Raphaël Zarka was the first to use in a skateboard environment.

Art forms and scientific research are drawn upon in a unique and spectacular way in this sculpture with its many references, reminiscent of the early 20th century, the constructivist and geometric abstraction movements and, in particular, works by trailblazing women such as Katarzyna Kobor, Lyubov Popova, Sophie Tauber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay