Hany Armanious: Stone Soup is the fourth exhibition in the series at Buxton Contemporary that focuses on an artist from the Buxton Collection. Building on the exhibition of the same name recently shown at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, this major solo exhibition includes works from throughout Armanious’ career including new and recent works. Encompassing the entire museum, this exhibition is accompanied by a publication jointly produced with the Henry Moore Institute.

Stone Soup is the artist’s largest exhibition to date, featuring more than 80 works spanning 15 years of practice, including a new commission and many works never before seen in Australia, and was guest curated by Laurence Sillars, Director of the Henry Moore Institute in collaboration with Samantha Comte, Head Curator and Charlotte Day, Director, Art Museums.

From the exhibition description:

Most of the objects we live with pass unnoticed, handled without thought. A shoelace, a candle, a child’s drawing, a paint tray, even a lump of Blu-Tack.

In Stone Soup, Hany Armanious, one of Australia’s leading artists, brings these objects back into view. Through the casting process, he remakes them as near-perfect doubles so precise they unsettle what we think we know.

His sculptures remind us of the joy of seeing something as if for the very first time, while unravelling our uncertainty about how we come to know the world through its things.

The exhibition includes Hany Armanious' Water Lilies, on loan from the Chartwell Collection and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Independent curator Max Delany writes on this work's inclusion for The Saturday Paper, "An additional, more meditative register emerges through works such as Water Lilies (2018), a monumental pigment print on linen spanning six metres, that depicts a studio wall repeatedly painted over to form a palimpsest of erasure and accumulation. Washed in soft lilacs, purples and pinks, it radiates a haze that shimmers like light across water – a panoramic fetishisation of the ordinary, doubling the familiar textures of the spaces we inhabit yet rarely notice."

Visit the Buxton Contemporary website for more information.