Gian Manik
You own the school, embrace your responsibility for its legacy

Harnessing imitative techniques honed during a childhood spent voraciously copying old master paintings, Gian Manik recasts and filtrates Caravaggio’s second version of Supper at Emmaus (1606). By speculating upon the futures and legacies of reproduced artworks, the exhibition demonstrates a research-led practice responding to the ontology of “institutional painting,” that has been canonised in western art history.

Gian Manik’s approach to painting is informed by an irreverence for genre and resistance to stylistic categorisation. Driven by a compulsion to paint, Manik’s artworks move dexterously between the polarities of figuration and abstraction. Within Manik’s layered surfaces, references from the fabric of his daily life and familial history converge with gestural passages to form a chaotic palimpsest of representation and memory. Nostalgic, melancholic and facetious, Manik’s paintings vibrate with emotional and compositional intensity.

Adopting an insouciant approach to both style and subject, the artist blurs the lines between mimesis and representation through the depiction of imagery gleaned from disparate sources such as the internet, popular culture, and personal memories. This characteristically irreverent methodology borrows from a wide compendium of images, thereby separating aesthetic considerations from hierarchical distinctions of high and low.

Gian Manik is represented by Sutton Gallery, Naarm Melbourne.