HANY ARMANIOUS produces installations and sculptural forms, as well as paintings and drawings that engagingly expand upon the role of the artist and the form of the artwork. He consistently surprises with his deft working and reworking of objects, materials, and references, remodeling the everyday in oddly lyrical ways.

Armanious appropriate an unlikely mix of notions with an obsessive relationship to form. In his provocative work uncanny actions take place upon unexpected materials, resulting in enigmatic objects, scenes and associations. He turns the process of casting into a witty, symbolic system, through which he detours and digresses, fostering both bemusement and engagement.

Armanious’ choice and treatment of materials are bound up in layers of allegory. Nothing is sacred; his mergers of forms, substances and metaphors are perverse. Casting is always on the agenda, employed to sample and connect disparate textures and concepts.
Armanious confronts conventional notions of sculpture and questions the medium’s relevance. He references the mystical in all its incarnations, giving form to the abstract and creating voids. Popular philosophies are purposefully intermingled with art-historical ones, offering the chance for the formless to take shape, and everyday objects to wittily reveal their aura.

Robert Leonard writes “Armanious shares much with Beuys and Barney: the alchemy idea, conspiracies of art and occult knowledge, fantasies about the artist as the centre of the universe, and a passion for casting…[But] while he engages us in the seductive idea of art as a transformative or transcendental project, the deeper we get into it the more we become mired in mixed metaphors and conceits… His work is psychological and phenomenological rather than cosmological or religious. He sponsors metaphysical inquiry and pulls the rug out from under it.”

SELECTED BIO:

HANY ARMANIOUS (Ismalia, Egypt, 1962) lives and works in Sydney, Australia. He holds a BA in Visual Arts, City Art Institute, Sydney.

Selected exhibitions include Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri (solo); Zero..., Milan; Elizabeth Dee, New York (all 2008); Foxy Production, New York (solo); City Gallery, Wellington (solo); Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland (solo)(all 2007); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (solo)(2006); Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (solo); Busan Biennale, (all 2006); Ocular Lab Inc., Melbourne, (solo); National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (both 2005); Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland (solo)(2004); Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne (solo)(2002); and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (solo)(2001).

Armanious’ work is included in the collection of the Dakis Joannou Foundation, Athens; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and the Auckland City Gallery, New Zealand, among others.

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