Summary
Raafat Ishak arrived in Australia from Egypt as a teenager, in 1982. His practice ranges over painting, sculpture and installation, and engages strongly with architectural language, Arabic cultural traditions and certain avant-garde artists and ideas. He often layers figurative imagery, graphic language and visual tropes to build complex works of art that slip between abstraction and representation, simultaneously revealing and obscuring their subject. It has been said of Ishak's work that, 'underscored by a utopian, romantic tendency, [it] is subtle, contemplative and alive to the nuances of cross-cultural dialogue and transit'.
The Art and Heritage Collection holds six works by Ishak, five of which belong to the series 'Graduate Research and Withdrawal'. The pictorial layers in each of these five works (#5, #10, #21, #24 and #34) are drawn together by the carefully plotted crimson lines of architectural drawings. The vanishing point of the perspective drawings pulls the viewer's eye into the depths of the pictorial space, which we find inhabited by urban landscapes and solitary figures. The dark plane that shadows these pieces is possibly a nod to Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square', which has a presence in other works by Ishak, such as his collaboration with Tom Nicholson, 'Proposition for a Banner March and Black Cube Hot Air Balloon'.
