This online exhibition introduces the works of Australian painter Gian Manik (b. 1985) ahead of the artist undertaking a residency this summer at Domus Nostra in Rome.
Gian Manik (b. 1985) is an Australian painter living and working in Melbourne (AUS). His practice seeks to decolonise European and heteronormative art-historical narratives, complicating traditional binaries such as native and foreign, local and global, self and other. Drawing on his research into Orientalist and queer portrayal in both art history and popular culture – including fashion, music, and performance – Manik challenges entrenched racial, ethnic, and phobic hierarchies that often permeate society and traditional pictorial spaces.
Manik’s references span a wide range of imagery, from 19th-century Orientalist paintings to AI-generated images circulated on Instagram, which he combines with personal experience and historical narratives to construct an inclusive visual vocabulary that deliberately disrupts established hierarchies of value and authorship.
