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 with graphic language and visual tropes to build complex works of art that slip between abstraction and representation, simultaneously revealing and obscuring their subject.
In his essay 'The art of living in the city', accessible via the Explore tab above, Chris McAuliffe argues that Ishak's depictions of urban space, exemplified by 'Medication Valley', express not a solid, reliable metropolis but a city that is both 'structured and fragmented, concrete and ephemeral'. His structures in this painting seem to stack and float. Free of engineered anchoring, they almost hover in relief against the plain ground of the canvas. 'Parts of the painting read like a plan,' says McAuliffe, 'with schematic cross-sections and structural details awaiting fabrication. But elsewhere lines and planes take on a life of their own, forms splinter and spread like a randomly tessellated mosaic. The painting, and the urban space it suggests, offers two kinds of pleasure. One is the reassuring stability of crisp, stable structures. The other is the seductive, free-form flow of improvised shapes.'
The collection holds five other works by Ishak, all of which belong to the series 'Graduate Research and Withdrawal'.
