Artists statement

Manik’s referential language maintains a fundamental connection to derided or “low-brow” sources, spanning popular and visual culture sources such as graffiti, google image searches or YouTube clips. In this work, Manik aestheticises a conspicuously framed police photograph, reproducing the sensationalist image with a considered painterly quality. Attending to the ways in which wide dissemination leads to a clouding and blurring of meaning, Manik challenges conventional ideas of authenticity, circulation, and so-called high/low modes of production.

Artist Bio
Gian Manik is a Naarm-based artist whose dextrous approach to image-making is characterised by an irreverence for genre and driven by a compulsion to paint. Interested in undermining the colonial properties arming the buttresses of historical painting, Manik ambiguates tradition through the representation of multivalent or tangential subjects.

Informed by a childhood spent voraciously copying reproductions of old master paintings, a subsequent indifference to the polarities of high and low culture has rendered his work resistant to traditional stylistic categorisation. Instead, Manik’s practice can be read as an ongoing investigation into the boundaries of representation which often sprawls into the modalities and enviornments of fashion, music and performance.

His compositions interweave both carefully distilled and intensely gestural passages, forming a layered palimpsest that references and registers the quotidian fabric of his social and cultural surroundings. Distinguished by an interminable mix of nostalgia and desire, drama and tragedy, his work reverberates an uncertainty of meaning. Strategies such as repetition and mimicry blur the intended resonance or ‘truth’ attributed to each object, place, scene or character. As a result, Manik’s paintings often function as parafictions, interpolating personal experience within constricted frameworks of historical narrative.

Gian Manik (b. 1985 in Perth/Boorloo) received a BFA (Honours) from Curtin University in 2011. After relocating to Naarm/Melbourne, the artist completed a Master of Fine Art (Honours) at Monash University in 2012. Since then, he has exhibited widely across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in institutional and commercial contexts. He has received institutional commissions by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2022) and the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art (2024). Additionally, his work has been featured in significant exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth/Boorloo and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.