Gian Manik Regenerative Strategies

Vessel Contemporary, Perth
28 June –
10 August 2025

Gian Manik

Regenerative Strategies

, 2025
Installation view

Regenerative Strategies, a major new commission by Australian painter Gian Manik, takes the form of nine discrete paintings, hung together to become, in the artist’s own words, ‘a landscape of different things functioning as one mass’. Created in collaboration with over 250 children from eight primary schools in and near the Walyalup/Fremantle area, the work is a reflection upon ideas of environment and place, encompassing pre- and post- colonial landscapes as well as speculative visions for the future.

Adhering to specific instructions around palette, brushes and canvas size, students were encouraged to depict imagery from their immediate environments to create a collaborative painting that would serve as a background for Manik to then contribute a final layer. From a select compendium of images including stock photography, speculative plans and drawings, and photographs from the artist’s own archive, Manik then added a translucent foreground to each canvas: bringing his own marks into dialogue with those of the local children while also connecting imagery of the landscape at different points in time. In this way, the work functions as a time capsule, bringing the past, present and future into immediate proximity.

The title of the exhibition makes use of the word ‘regenerative’, employed practically as an ecological term as well as a recent buzzword in writing about contemporary art. Here, it can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically to consider the role of art, especially in the context of a community project, as a tool for collective thinking about the future of our environment.

Born and raised in Boorloo/Perth and now living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, Manik was an enthusiastic artist from a young age. Returning to Western Australia for this exhibition, Manik has embraced the opportunity for intergenerational skill-sharing and exchange with the next generation of emerging artists. Regenerative Strategies is a pertinent and poetic response to environmental issues, and an experimental approach to painting, both in practice and presentation.

Curated by Annika Kristensen

With thanks from Gian, to participating schools:
Lance Holt School
North Fremantle Primary School
East Fremantle Primary School
White Gum Valley Primary School
Richmond Primary School
Beaconsfield Primary School
Cottesloe Primary School and Our Lady of Fatima

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.

Manik was a resident artist at Gertrude Studios from 2022-2024, previously undertaking residencies at Bundanon, NSW; DESA, Indonesia, and The Australian Ballet. Manik is Ramsay Art Prize finalist (2023), and recently was named the 2025 Artist in Residence at the Monash University Prato Centre in Prato, Italy. Examples of his work are found in important public collections including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth/Boorloo; City of Darebin, Naarm/Melbourne; Artbank, Sydney; Lawson Flats, Perth/Boorloo and numerous private collections across Australia, New Zealand, North America and Europe.

Artist’s profile