Dreaming From Afar w/Gian Manik: 20th of February, 2026.

Dreaming From Afar is a new group exhibition showing at Gus Fisher which brings together the practices of Gian Manik, Brunelle Dias Primbs, and Tyrone Te Waa. The show circulates the complexities of history, and nostalgia through this painterly language that seeks to morph the physical with the imagined. 

Gian Manik is a Naarm-based painter, who produces mesmerising works that play with ​​various tropes preserved within the historical painting genres of still life, landscape, and portraiture. Within Dreaming From Afar Manik showcases a beautiful body of paintings that includes various methods of painterly application. Intimate and finely rendered works on oil on canvas, as well as these lively frescos that become one with the gallery space itself. 

The works themselves bring together Manik's fascination with historical painting, and old masters, alongside his research and exploration of orientalism and queer representation within art history. Pulling these themes together in space to produce works that grapple with the entrenched hetero and ethnocentric hierarchies of the western art cannon.

Maya caught up with Gian about the show and overall practice.