Artist Biography

Working across painting, sculpture and installation, Raafat Ishak is highly regarded as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. His multidisciplinary and often collaborative practice utilises abstraction and seriality to critically examine how the organisational principles of architecture and the cultural politics of statehood shape communal experience. Ishak’s long-term artistic project is located within a rich history of artists who respond critically and empathically toward social, political and economic conditions, providing utopian counterpoints to the anxieties of our time. As such, his work often mediates the aesthetic modes and formulae of the cubist, constructivist and supremacist circles of the early 20^th century European avant-garde. Working within the constricted aesthetic modalities such as bureaucratic sizing and modular assembly, Ishak’s unique compositions often oscillate between structure and chaos. Picturing recurrent symbols, motifs and forms through iterant painting series, wall drawings, sculptures and installations, Raafat Ishak has created an index of linguistic references that highlight the circularity and interdependency of culture. 

Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1967, Ishak migrated to Australia in 1982. After graduating from the Victorian College of Arts with a BFA (Painting) in 1990, Ishak held his first major solo exhibition And Government at the Melbourne exhibition space ‘200 Gertrude Street’ in 1995. Subsequently, he was closely involved in artist run spaces throughout the city, himself being one of the founding members of Ocular Lab (2003-2010), an artist’s collective and exhibition space that served as a cross-generational forum for the collaboration, exchange and discussion of ideas around contemporary art. Ishak returned to the University of Melbourne over a decade later, consolidating his interest in the history and conservation of architecture through a postgraduate degree in 2004. He completed his PhD in 2014 in the department of Fine Arts at Monash University, producing a thesis that traced the conceptual and formal proximities of Kazimir Malevich’s 1913 painting of a black square and the Kaaba at the centre of the Great Mosque of Mecca.

Ishak has exhibited regularly throughout Australia and overseas for over two decades. His work Responses to an immigration request from 194 governments was shown at the 54^th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in the curated exhibition The Future of Promise (2011). He has featured in numerous significant exhibitions in institutions, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, AU; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, CA; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, SG; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, AU; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, AU; Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, AU; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, AU. In 2023, the artist was the subject of a major solo exhibition Eye Looking at Large Glass Broken at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, accompanied by a monographic catalogue published by Sonntag Press that followed the recurrent impulses driving Ishak’s practice for over twenty years. Recently Ishak was awarded the Metro Tunnel Legacy Artwork commission to produce a site-specific installation at the new Anzac metro station in Melbourne, opening in 2025.

His work is included in prominent and international collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney; University of Melbourne, Melbourne; University of Queensland, Brisbane, and the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE, among other private and public collections in Australia and overseas.