Art Wall: Raafat Ishak

Sherbourne Bear at Tallygaroopna

From 1 March 2026

Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, Raafat Ishak is highly regarded as one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists. In Sherbourne Bear at Tallygaroopna, 2026, Ishak weaves local history, literary symbolism, and modernist political architecture into a meditation on time, ambition, and settler coloniaIism.

Referencing Shepparton's namesake, Sherbourne Sheppard, and a symbolic bear drawn from children's literature, the work layers personal myth with place-based narrative. Within the geometric wall painting, Sherbourne stands at a threshold between two ideological paths: a staircase representing individual ambition, and an elevated structure evoking the Russian architect and artist El Lissitzky's unrealised 1924 socialist building Wolkenbügel. Settler colonialism is framed as a passage that cuts through time and space-a suspended, continuous moment in which history, ideology, and imagination intersect.

About the artist:

Raafat Ishak (b. 1967 Cairo, Egypt, migrated to Australia in 1982) is a Melbourne-based artist and Head of Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts. Ishak has exhibited regularly throughout Australia and overseas for over two decades and recently completed the Metro Tunnel Legacy Artwork commission, a site-specific installation at the newly opened Anzac Station in Melbourne. His work Responses to an immigration request from 194 governments was shown at the 54th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia in the curated exhibition The Future of Promise, 2011, and was featured in a major solo exhibition Eye Looking at Large Glass Broken at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2023.

Ishak is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.