Queer Australian Art and KINK acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of the lands and waters of this continent. KINK conducts its work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation in Naarm Melbourne, the Turrbal and Jagera peoples in Meanjin Brisbane and the Gadigal lands of the Eora Nation, Sydney. We pay respect to elders past, present, and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.

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You are here too by Kink, published 21.03.2025

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(artist)

Gian Manik

He/Him
Born in Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia, Australia.
Gian Manik, 'Victory and conflict', 2022, Oil, synthetic polymer and spray paint on canvas, 280 x 520 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery.

Bio

Gian Manik (b. 1985) 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 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.

Manik 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.

Based in

Naarm (Melbourne), Victoria, Australia

Resources

Website
Further reading: "Victory and conflict"

Artworks

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