For his first solo exhibition with the gallery and in London, Australian artist Gian Manik (b. 1985) presents a new body of paintings and a site-specific mural that reimagine the visual language of Orientalist painting through an exploration of identity and race. Engaging with the genre’s historical depictions of racialised and

sexualised subjects, Manik subverts its conventions to explore the intersections of queerness, race and ethnicity, reclaiming space for identities historically marginalised within the canon of Western art history.

 

Central to Manik’s practice is a critical engagement with the legacies of Orientalism and the ways in which colonial image-making has constructed exoticised and gendered identities. Having first encountered painting through reproductions of historical artworks, he approaches established imagery, not as a fixed visual language, but as something that can be revisited and reworked. Bringing together references drawn from art history, contemporary visual culture and his own experiences, Manik places these disparate sources in dialogue. In doing so, he unsettles the established modes of representation and brings historical visual traditions into conversation with his own diasporic experience and cultural hybridity. His paintings question inherited narratives of power and authorship, exposing the mechanisms through which desire, spectacle

and difference have been historically represented.

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Among the new works is a series of small-scale paintings that approach the subject of intimacy through closely cropped, cinematic compositions. Tender moments of physical connection unfold across the picture plane, from the gentle caress of a hand against a bare back to the quiet closeness of two figures resting

against one another. Rendered with a jewel-like quality, these scenes bring gestures of affection and desire into the foreground.

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Queer culture likewise operates as both subject and methodology within Manik's work. His paintings foreground forms of intimacy, theatricality and self-fashioning that resist fixed identities, embracing ambiguity, sensuality and performativity. Through this intersection of queer aesthetics and postcolonial critique, Manik expands the possibilities of painting as a space where histories can be reimagined and dominant modes of representation disrupted. 

 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a newly commissioned essay written by Kit Gurnos, London-based curator and writer specialising in contemporary art with a focus on queer-led narratives.