Hany Armanious: Stone Soup

Hany Armanious, one of Australia’s leading sculptors, playfully lays bare the fundamental decisions and processes of making and presenting sculpture.

Armanious moved from Egypt to Australia as a child and has spoken of his experiences of a cultural shift, relearning the world though its material language as much as its spoken one. His sculpture practice throws into question any certainty of knowing the world through its things, while unravelling the experience of encountering objects for the very first time.

Starting with modest, found objects from the domestic world, Armanious follows a convoluted process to create duplicates, or ‘distillations’ of these originals, creating a mould and then a near-identical cast of his starting subject. Presented as standalone forms or as accumulations of several different objects, his sculptures toy with the notion of originality and the dependability of the physical world to learn or be a manifestation of truth. In the era of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, this relationship is only ever becoming more unstable. Enduringly playful, Armanious’ works also prod at the legacies of modern painting and sculpture.

This will be Armanious’ first solo, institutional exhibition in Europe and will include work from the last 20 years.