The Institute of Modern Art ends the year with a bold Quarter Four program, including a major Mitch Cairns survey show Artist’s Mouth.

On Saturday 10 October, the Institute of Modern Art launches its 2026 Quarter Four program, featuring Artist’s Mouth, a major survey exhibition of Gadigal/Sydney painter and 2017 Archibald Prize winner Mitch Cairns, and videos by British artist Kate Cooper.

Artist’s Mouth traces Cairns’s artistic journey since graduating from the National Art School in Gadigal/Sydney twenty years ago in 2006, starting with a still life he painted in his last year at the School. Artist’s Mouth is the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date. It’s been curated by NAS Gallery Curator Lucy Latella and IMA Director Robert Leonard, as a joint project with NAS Gallery, where it opened earlier this year.

Since graduating in 2006, Cairns has emerged as a painter of curiosity, flair, and originality, whose work interweaves lessons learnt from cubism, comics, and concrete poetry. He is a cool, calculating, intellectual painter, with a wry sense of humour, who produces puzzle pictures that play with pictorial conventions.

IMA Director Robert Leonard says, ‘My introduction to Cairns’s work was a eureka moment, standing in front of his 2016 painting Geranium Pots (Interior). It shows a workman who could be constructing a painting or smashing it. It struck me that Cairns does both at once.’

Cairns’s subjects are drawn from his personal experience and niche interests. NAS Gallery curator Lucy Latella says, ‘Over the past twenty years, Mitch Cairns has established himself as a prolific, meticulous image maker. This selection of work across various media highlights his anachronistic, cross-referential oeuvre, which is persistently unsettled by humour, local references, and a sensitivity to contemporary lived experience.’

Cairns’s works manage to feel simultaneously pop and retro. As Wes Hill writes, he ‘engages less with tradition than with the anachronism of his obsessions, chasing offbeat images for the ages in our own foreboding times’.

Artist’s Mouth is accompanied by a major monograph, featuring essays by the curators and by guest writers Wes Hill and Kate Lilley, and plates of all the works in the show. It also contains the artist book, Penne and Other Shorter Written Works—a book within the book. It’s available to purchase from the IMA Gallery Shop.

Alongside Artist’s Mouth, the IMA Screening Room hosts computer-generated videos by British artist Kate Cooper: Infection Drivers (2018) and Untitled (After Somatic Aliasing) (2022). Presenting bodies in conflict with themselves, Cooper challenges our expectations of the body’s limitations and highlights the malleability of gender and identity. She explores how bodies are imagined and imaged, understood and controlled—and how they resist.

Quarter Four opens at the Institute of Modern Art on Saturday 10 October, with opening celebrations on Friday 9 October 2026, at 6pm.