Event Mitch Cairns and Kate Cooper

Mitch Cairns and Kate Cooper

Exhibition Opening

9 October 2026
6pm

  • Location:
    Ground Floor Gallery
  • Event Cost:
    Free
  • Registration:

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.

The Institute of Modern Art acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the IMA now stands, the Jagera, Yuggera, Yugarapul, and Turrbal people. We offer our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the first artists of this country. In the spirit of allyship, the IMA will continue to work with First Nations people to celebrate, support, and present their immense past, present, and future contribution to artistic practice and cultural expression.

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