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 symbolically multivalent and tangential subjects.

Informed by a childhood spent voraciously copying and attentively studying old master paintings from textbooks and reproductions, a subsequent indifference to the polarities of high and low culture that 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. In departing from grand narratives, the artist blurs the truth and fiction attributed to each object, place or character, functioning as parafictions or speculations.

Gian Manik (b. 1981 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 (ACCA, 2022) and the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA, 2024). Additionally, his work has been featured in significant exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), Perth and the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Adelaide.

Recently, Manik was a resident artist at Gertrude Studios (2022-2024), previously undertaking residencies at Bundanon, NSW; DESA in Bali, Indonesia and the Australian Ballet in Naarm/Melbourne. His works are included in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, Lawson Flats and numerous private collections across Australia, New Zealand, North America and Europe.