Exhibition Opening | Quarter Four: Mitch Cairns, Kate Cooper

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.

The Screening Room hosts videos by London and Amsterdam-based artist, Kate Cooper, Infection Drivers (2018) and Untitled (After Somatic Aliasing) (2022). Her work explores how bodies are imagined and imaged, understood and controlled, and how they resist.