Jordan Marani 'Warehouse'

Jordan Marani
Warehouse
22 March - 26 April 2025

Jordan Marani’s Warehouse draws from his time stacking boxes on the shelves of a wholesale warehouse in Richmond. The cardboard boxes were often marked on the base with a pattern, to be used for optimum efficiency when stacking a shipping pallet to travel from manufacturer to the distributor. Marani’s paintings are based on various pallet patterns he collected from the bases of those boxes. A combination of high art and a basis in working class realities is typical of Marani’s work. Here this is apparent in the employment of what appears as formal geometric abstraction, based on his experience of manual labour and systems of efficiency and productivity.

The pun of industrial pallet and the artist’s palette appeals to Marani’s sense of humour and autobiographical tendency. He has used the raw ground of the canvas to suggest the colour of cardboard, and also employs fluorescent colours to evoke the ‘hi vis’ clothing of factory settings. Of the series, he comments: “Working in those environments was kind of shit for me, I needed to find some value in my working landscape”.

Jordan Marani makes darkly humorous work involving personal narratives, cynical observations of the human condition and explorations of family, loss and the past. Through painting and sculpture employing bright colour, humour and word play, he explores the funny side of the dark side.

Marani makes art of the everyday, reflecting his immediate surroundings and community. His work is drawn from such crude and everyday references as suburban life, popular culture, booze, football, the art world and family history. Early works used materials from scavenged, recycled and reclaimed rubbish, such as paintings on boards salvaged from skips, bottletops, and food packaging, and from basic and impoverished materials, such as cardboard and house paint. Recent works continue to utilise humble materials, such as bed sheets and handkerchiefs, alongside more formal and polished works on board and canvas. Marani blends lowbrow culture with high art, with an insistence on the value of the working class and crass.

Over the last 30 years Marani’s work has been littered with profanity drawn from the ugly vernacular of Australian politics and the pub. He started creating text and four-letter word paintings in the late 1980s, with a series of ‘Shit Paintings’, and has been exploring word play, profanity and the joys of four-letter words ever since. His multi-faceted practice includes figurative and narrative-driven paintings alongside ongoing series of text-paintings, installation and found-object sculptures.

From 2008-2011 Jordan was co-founder and director of Hell Gallery. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Victoria, NADA New York, Minor Attractions Art Fair, London, the Spinnerei Leipzig, SOCIAL Hobart, Shepparton Art Museum, Static Gallery Liverpool, Switchback Gallery, 200 Gertrude Street, Daine Singer, Neon Parc, Utopian Slumps, Ryan Renshaw, Ray Hughes Gallery, Powell Street Gallery and at ARIs including Death Be Kind, Inflight, Seventh, and West Space.

He has participated in residencies at the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany, Driving Creek Pottery in Aotearoa New Zealand, Police Point Artist-in-Residence Program Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Australia Council Liverpool Residency and Gertrude Contemporary. His work is held in the collections of the Yarra City Council, Merri-bek Art Collection, LIA Leipzig, and Ararat Textile Art Museum.