Michael Staniak is an Australian artist whose experimental, digital media-inspired paintings explore process, materiality and abstraction in a digital era. His work is informed by online acts, culture and aesthetics as it questions the changing effects of technology upon contemporary image production and consumption.

Michael Staniak, born 1982, is an Australian artist based in Melbourne and a graduate of the Victoria College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne (BFA, MFA) and the Middle Tennessee State University. Selected solo exhibitions include BLUE TIMES, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna (2014), Slow Pictures at Artereal Gallery in Sydney (2014), Internet Blueprints at Art Brussels with Steve Turner Contemporary (2014) and Image DNA at Steve Turner Contemporary (2014). Selected group shows include Dashboard at Kalpany in Milan (2014), Merge Visible at Horton Gallery in New York (2013), #Pseudoreal at Judith Charles Gallery in New York (2013) and Primal Mutation at the Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin (2012). He received the Australia Council’s Artstart Grant in 2013, the Stirling Group Award in 2009, the Acacia Award in 2007 and was a finalist in the Metro Gallery 2012 and 2010 Art Award selection. He was also a pavilion curator for The Wrong new digital art gallery in Melbourne, Australia (2013) and is the founder and Director of Paradise Hills Gallery, an artist run initiative in Melbourne Victoria.