Hany Armanious is a sculptor based in Sydney, Australia. He is known for his uncanny, often humorous replicas of everyday objects, which subvert viewers' understandings of material culture, morphology, and value under the veneer of familiarity.
Read MoreHany Armanious was born in Ismailia, Egypt, in 1962, and emigrated to Australia at age six. This experience of cultural shift, the artist has said, reshaped his perception of the world by exposing him to new languages and materials.
Armanious graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney's City Art Institute (now the UNSW School of Art & Design) in 1984. In 2021, he was awarded a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong, New South Wales.
Since 2019, Armanious has taught at Sydney's National Art School, where he is Head of Sculpture. He has held teaching positions at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; the College of Fine Art, UNSW; and Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University.
The paradox in Armanious' sculptures and installations lies in their initial appearance as readymades, taken and assembled from the everyday world.
Rather, they are near-identical replicas of found objects—including tabletops, candles, or discarded building material—which Armanious casts in resin to imbue the object with new meaning. Presented collectively, they exploit and subvert our instinct to identify relationships between things, as well as assumptions around form, materiality, and function.
Armanious spoke of his process with Ocula Magazine in 2016 here.
Armanious represented Australia at the 54th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. His presentation, The Golden Thread, consisted of a range of cast tables, pedestals, and plinth forms simultaneously teasing the formal concern of display methods in postmodern sculpture and imbuing mundane objects with an altar-like sanctity.
Figure Eight (2010) appears as a giant polyurethane anvil with an old-fashioned metal iron perched atop, while Birth of Venus (2010) is a wide, flat plinth, painted white with a piece of duct tape on its surface. African Witch Doctor (2011) consists of a tower of stacked woven baskets, paired with a standing table frame.
By presenting such disparate categories of objects in unison, Armanious playfully uncovers the potential for novel associations to form, invoking a moment of recognition and then subverting it with linguistic tangents.
Armanious' first solo institutional exhibition in the U.K. opened in 2024 at Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Spanning decades of his practice, the survey included works from his 2011 Venice Biennale presentation through to recent sculptures like Image (2024), a grubby styrofoam box surrounded by dead leaves, and Mumble (2023), a shoelace wrapped around half-used crayons.
Speaking to Ocula Magazine on the dynamic between his artworks and their titles, Armanious said: 'I don't really know what I'm making until I find the words to name it. The title is integral. It actually helps me to understand [the work].'
Despite the 'kind of decrepit and a bit fucked up' nature of his sculptures, Armanious said, 'I don't think makes them any less beautiful. In fact, I find them sort of redemptive gestures.'
Armanious has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australasia, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Select solo exhibitions include Stone Soup, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2024); Tabula Rasa, Michael Lett, Auckland (2022); Acheiropoieta, Fine Arts, Sydney (2022); O Week, Michael Lett (2019); Hany Armanious: Frequently Asked Questions, Southard Reid, London (2016); Selflok, City Gallery, Wellington (2014); we go outside, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2013); The Golden Thread, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2012); Fountain, MCA Sculpture Terrace commission, Sydney (2012); Birth of Venus, Foxy Production, New York (2010); and The Oracle, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, U.S. (2008).
Select group exhibitions include Fine Arts, Sydney (2024); Stupid As, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2024); Group Portrait, Phillida Reid, London/Michael Lett, Auckland (2023); Farr St, Minerva, Sydney (2022); Walls to Live Beside, Rooms to Own: The Chartwell Show, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland (2022); and Out of Place, Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (2021).
Armanious is represented by Fine Arts, Sydney in Australia; Michael Lett in New Zealand; Foxy Production in New York; and Phillida Reid in London.
Armanious' practice is the subject of the monographs Turns in Arabba (Michael Lett, 2005); Morphic Resonance (City Gallery, Wellington and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2007); and Prototypes (Monash University Museum of Art, 2012). He has been written about in publications including Frieze, The Guardian, Artforum, The New York Times, and Art Asia Pacific.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2024
