Circle Square is a solo exhibition of new sculptural works by Hany Armanious (b. Ismailia, Egypt. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia). Casting primarily with pigmented polyurethane resin, alongside metals such as brass and silver, Armanious creates uncannily veristic unique duplicates or 'distillations' of found objects, sometimes presented alone; often in idiosyncratic, seemingly coincidental pairs or groupings.
Armanious's work is an exercise in doubling: the implicated, absent original, often destroyed in the process of cast-making, and the present facsimile; the physical object and the voided space it leaves behind when cast; the double take as it becomes apparent that the work is not, as it appears, a readymade or a found object, but a meticulously crafted re-creation.
The objects depicted tend to be forms caught in transitory states – a block of pale stone roughly hacked at; a hewn wooden pillar on its way to some final, undisclosed design – or interrupted mid-encounter – a scrap of styrofoam cradled by a wooden umbrella stand, or an upturned sink resting on a brass table – fragments rescued from imminent waste and entropy, renegotiated as formal and final propositions.
Any implied functionality is undermined to the extent that, in a work such as Yes and No, whatever purpose these objects originally served is overridden by the poetic potential of their sequencing. Wow stages a pair of silver clothes hangers dangling from a gold screw (also cast): one is broken so as to make explicit the simple interlocking of the two shapes. Spooks sees a clear plastic punnet, repurposed as a loom for latticed grass, insinuate the body of a large, flattened insect, in dialogue with a drinking glass decorated with a similar latticed pattern. Vitrine's chair with no back insists on the clear space of display above content or narrative. Deprived of function, Armanious's objects are returned to us as sole and primary form.
Armanious has spoken of allowing these unassuming, often abandoned or throwaway objects and arrangements to approach him; to demand that they are taken seriously, valued as meaningful, redeemed. He speaks of adjusting to a state of surrendered control, letting things impose themselves on him, projecting their presence into his line of sight. Through the painstaking process of casting and remaking, Armanious draws out the active character or essential aura of these objects – their solemnity and their humour, their urge to perform – and coaxes them into a new mode of existence.
Armanious's first institutional solo show in Europe, Stone Soup, opened at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2024, and will tour to Buxton Contemporary, Australia, in November 2025, accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with text by curator Laurence Sillars.
