Miltos Manetas (Greek, b. 1964) is a painter, conceptual artist and theorist whose work explores the representation and aesthetics of the information society.In 2000 he published the Neen Manifesto, founding NEEN, an art movement built around a generation of artists who glorified computers and used the web as their gallery.,In 2009 the Venice Biennale invited him to create its first Internet Pavilion.
Two years after the manifesto, Manetas and Peter Lunenfeld registered the unclaimed domain whitneybiennial.com. They used it to stage an unauthorised online exhibition timed to the Whitney Museum's actual biennial, showing Flash-based works by around twenty Neen-associated artists including Rafaël Rozendaal and Han Hoogerbrugge.In an essay from that project, Manetas wrote that “Websites are today's most radical and important art objects”.
As a painter, Manetas has been placed alongside Mauro Ceolin within a reflection on the Western painting tradition, moving from still life and interior painting to landscape and portraiture.His large-scale oil paintings of cables and USBs, among them Cables III (1997), Untitled (hand with cables) (1998) and Cables (Togetherness) (2009), were shown at the 2018 Athens Biennale, where they were described as capturing the simplicity underpinning a constant information overload.
Manetas returned to the Internet Pavilion concept for the Venice Biennale twice more, with “The Island of the Net” in 2011 and “The Unconnected” in 2013. In 2014, invited by Rome's Swiss Institute to bring Swiss art into the digital age, he introduced the concept of Ñewpressionism, developed through techniques he called Overeality and Metascreen. In 2018, “Internet Paintings”, a three-month performative exhibition of his work, was staged at Rome's MAXXI museum.
His work is held in the collections of MAXXI in Rome, the Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, among others.
