Mitch Cairns and Kate Cooper
Exhibition Opening
9 October 2026
6pm
Join us to celebrate the opening of the IMA’s Quarter Four with Mitch Cairns: Artist’s Mouth, a major survey exhibition of work by Sydney-based artist Mitch Cairns. A joint project by NAS Gallery, the exhibition is co-curated by Lucy Latella, NAS Curator, Exhibitions, and Robert Leonard, IMA Director. This is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Cairns’ work to date.
The exhibition features key works from Cairns’ oeuvre – including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and artist publications – highlighting his distinctive modernist sensibility, playful abstraction, and reductive approach to form. Spanning two decades, the exhibition traces his evolving influences: from early student works to recent and new commissions, reflecting his ongoing engagement with self-reflection, the poetics and banality of daily life, concrete poetry, language and text, and significant figures in art and literature.
Featured in the IMA’s screening room are two video works Infection Drivers (2018) and Untitled (After Somatic Aliasing) (2022) by London and Amsterdam-based artist, Kate Cooper.