Hany Armanious Represents Australia at 2011 Venice Biennale

Hany Armanious, an artist born in Egypt in 1962 and now based in Australia, showcased his work at the Venice Biennale in 2011, under the curation of Anne Ellegood. His artistic practice, which began in the early 1990s in Los Angeles, involves casting ordinary items in polyurethane resin, emphasizing themes of fragility and value. A notable artwork, Party Pooper (2010), displays five resin-cast objects on an unstable shelf. Armanious draws inspiration from figures like Edvard Munch and Picasso, as seen in his piece Effigy of an Effigy with a Mirage, which features a cast of Picasso's 1930 Woman's Head. He is associated with the concept of the informe, notably presented in the 1996 L'Informe exhibition at Centre Pompidou. For the Venice catalogue, he selected Rachel Kushner's short story China Girl.