Egyptian-born sculptor Hany Armanious has established himself as one of Australia's most innovative contemporary artists, transforming everyday objects into enigmatic sculptural works that challenge perception and reality. Currently serving as head of sculpture at Sydney's National Art School, Armanious is the subject of a major survey exhibition that recently opened at Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, following a critically acclaimed debut at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
Born in Ismailia, Egypt, in 1962, Armanious immigrated to Australia with his family at age six, experiencing a cultural and linguistic displacement that profoundly shaped his artistic vision. "I was not ready for the color!" he explained in a recent interview. "Cairo is predominantly grey and dusty, and there's not a lot of trees or greenery, so what was most striking was the bright green of so many trees, the really bright red of the terracotta roofs on the houses and just how bright the light was; it really was like stepping into another world. It was like being on drugs." This early experience of intense visual and cultural transformation continues to drive his exploration of the uncanny dimensions of everyday life.
Armanious emerged as a central figure in the grunge art movement of the early 1990s, participating in legendary exhibitions such as "Rad Scunge" and "Monster Field." His work was included in the curated Aperto section of the 1993 Venice Biennale, marking his international debut. In 1998, he received the prestigious Moët & Chandon Award for "Untitled Snake Oil," an elegant installation of hot-melt pigmented resin and glassware that evoked alchemical processes of material transformation.
The artist's career reached another milestone when he represented Australia at the 2011 Venice Biennale, presenting meticulously cast sculptural objects that were simultaneously archaic and modern, formal and informal, concrete and uncanny. These works reimagined everyday materials as relics of uncertain origin and function, demonstrating his mastery of complex casting and assemblage techniques.
Armanious is renowned for his extraordinary processes of material transformation, turning commonplace objects into elevated artifacts that exist between the haptic and symbolic, the illusory and real. He exploits the fluid properties of materials including hot-melt plastics, lead, clay, wax, peppercorns, resins, and glass to encourage chance formations according to natural laws, endowing his sculptures with organic life.
The current exhibition, "Hany Armanious: Stone Soup," was curated by Henry Moore Institute director Laurence Sillars in collaboration with Charlotte Day and Samantha Comte at Buxton Contemporary. Like a form of three-dimensional printmaking, Armanious's casting of pigmented polyurethane resin achieves impossible verisimilitude and luminosity, freezing time and matter while preserving ordinariness and presence.
Appearances in Armanious's work are deliberately deceiving. Functioning as paradoxical replicas, his sculptures occupy the space between what they are and what they appear to be. A piece may read as a ready-made assemblage yet be entirely handmade, produced painstakingly over time. A cast object might seem more real than its source, creating riddles of material truth versus perceptual belief.
While his practice is sculptural in form, Armanious's early training as a painter continues to shape his engagement with questions of appearance, illusion, and reality. "Flat Earth" (2017) appears suspended like a painting turned to the wall—a muddy cake of cement pressed into the reverse side of a stretched canvas. The work recalls Gustave Courbet's "L'Origine du monde" (1866), pushing realism to its limits and exposing the erotic nature of representation itself.
His "Sneeze Paintings" (2010) translate sensation into sculptural form, cast in polyurethane resin rather than painted on canvas. These paradoxical objects capture the ephemerality and momentary loss of control of a sneeze, giving form to sensations of anticipation, tickle, release, and the quiet melancholy that follows.
Armanious's work maintains dialogue with the sculptural canon, drawing loose inspiration from Brancusi's essentialism, Duchamp's ready-made, Picasso's hybridity, Giacometti's existential precariousness, and Bourgeois's teasing eroticism. Arte povera's humble poetics meet the grandeur of ancient Egyptian ritual objects, raising questions about perception, meaning, and mortality.
Deeper lines of cultural inheritance appear in series such as his "Moths" and "Sphinxes," which revisit traditions of still life and assemblage as contemporary memento mori that blur thresholds between animate and inert. "Moths are guardians of the underworld," the artist notes. "They're strangely ugly and inscrutable, and incredibly energetic, with a weird anatomy." The Sphinx sculptures invoke both cultural ancestry and formal sculptural problems, creating hybrid figures poised between human and animal, Egypt and Australia.
In gallery installations, Armanious creates intricate mise en scène where sculptural objects, images, and surfaces conspire to transform space into fields of perceptual play. Sculptures rest directly on floors or lean against walls, typically without plinths, becoming continuous with viewers' space. Printed trompe-l'oeil images of stains, peeling plaster, and screw holes on walls implicate the architecture itself in the work's unfolding drama.
Works like "Water Lilies" (2018), a monumental pigment print on linen spanning six meters, depict studio walls repeatedly painted over to form palimpsests of erasure and accumulation. Washed in soft lilacs, purples, and pinks, it radiates a haze that shimmers like light across water—a panoramic celebration of ordinary textures we inhabit but rarely notice.
As American curator Anne Ellegood has written, Armanious honors the primordial urge to understand world mysteries through object-making. His art invites the same impulse in viewers, making close looking an act of attention with ethical weight, insisting that humble surroundings deserve scrutiny, curiosity, and care. In a culture of speed and surface attention, Armanious slows perception down, creating objects that resist quick consumption and reward sustained reflection.
Titles such as "Plato's Cave," "We Astrologers," and "Empathy Chart" operate as philosophical prompts, provoking speculation about belief versus knowledge, illusion versus enlightenment. Like sphinx riddles, Armanious's conundrums aren't meant to be solved but lived with. "My work gives equal value to everything," Armanious explains, "which is also to say that everything deserves to be looked at and nothing should be taken for granted." This philosophy positions him as an existential sculptor of the everyday, memorializing its absurdities while insisting they be taken seriously.
