Raafat Ishak
Oil on MDF
Raafat Ishak was born in Egypt in 1967 and migrated to Australia in 1982. His interdisciplinary practise ranges from painting, installation and site-specific drawing, informed by architecture and his Arabic cultural heritage. Ishak’s work is often punctuated by the symbiotic relationship between the political and the personal, exploring the nuances of cross-cultural dialogue in the process. These paintings by Ishak, from a series of works each bearing the name of a nut as a way of serialising their titles, are typical of his approach to image-making. Fragments quoted from diverse sources in art history, design – especially architecture – and elsewhere are overlaid to condense broad spans of historical time into each work. Ishak stages encounters between ancient and modern cultures throughout his paintings.