RoyAdzak
Biography
Born Royston Stanley Wright, Roy Adzak was an artist working primarily in sculpture, photography, engraving, and painting, exploring visual perception through volumes, voids, reliefs, and imprints. He first studied engineering and architecture, receiving a degree from the University of Reading, which enabled him to emigrate to Wellington, New Zealand, where he worked as a construction engineer. Adzak was taken by the Australian landscape and Indigenous culture, drawing inspiration from natural traces left on desert sands and animal drawings of Aboriginal artists. He then traveled through western Asia and the Middle East, taking his last name from an Afghan family, who had welcomed him during his stay in 1955. In Afghanistan, he joined an archaeological dig and became enthralled with the illusion of relief forms. These aspects of the trace, the silhouette, and the play between the absence and presence of forms, became fundamental to his practice. Adzak returned to Europe the following year, settling in Paris; these studies and works developed into an expanding practice revolving around anthropomorphic molding and imprinting. In parallel, Adzak began experimenting with the process of dehydration taken with the rendering of the organic process of time. This practice evolved into series such as the Anthropometric (1972–86): Working with plaster casts, X-rays and ultrasounds, he produced prints and sculptures that hark back to his interest in Aboriginal art. Using the thermographic process, Adzak created the legendary series of one hundred portraits for the Rolling Stones album Emotional Rescue (1980). As his lasting work, Adzak designed and built the “Container Museum,” his sculpture studio in the Parisian district of Belleville. Inaugurated in 1984 as the Musée Adzak, it hosted residencies and exhibitions. The artist books Fire-imprint (1975) and Roy Adzak: dehydration = déshydratation (1978) are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London. Additional collections with works by Adzak include the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Toronto Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Adzak has been featured in exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Malmö Museum, and the Oldenburger Kunstverein.
