Mitch Cairns announced as inaugural Neil Balnaves Fellow

Congratulation Mitch Cairns!

The Balnaves Foundation and Mosman Art Gallery are pleased to announce artist Mitch Cairns as the inaugural recipient of The Neil Balnaves Fellowship.

Valued at $80,000 and in honour of our Founder Neil Balnaves AO, this is a major initiative to support the development of a significant piece of research or creative endeavour over a two-year period.

Honouring Neil’s legacy and his longstanding commitment to Mosman’s place in Australian art history, The Neil Balnaves Fellowship continues the successful partnership between the Gallery, the Balnaves family and The Balnaves Foundation. Together we have fostered a rich legacy of collections, commissions, research, education and public engagement.

Cairns will develop and present a new exhibition that connects three sites of artistic and poetic significance: Little Sparta, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden sculpture in Dunsyre, Scotland; Mosman Art Gallery’s Grand Hall; and the Mosman Art Trail, which brings to life The Balnaves Gift, one of Australia’s most important collections of Impressionist and early twentieth-century painting.

This is the first of two Neil Balnaves Fellowships to be awarded. Applications for the second Fellowship will open in mid-2027.

Mitch Cairns said: “As an artist whose practice is underpinned by a love of the poetic and poetic values, the mixing of language and language-as-visual cue, the support for such a focused creative project is a refreshing and inspiring opportunity for me. This Fellowship comes at a crucial moment in my career, as I celebrate my twenty years of practice with the opportunity to meaningfully consolidate these related artistic aims of my practice with an ambitious presentation in The Grand Hall of Mosman Art Gallery, a new publication and with the valued support of The Neil Balnaves Fellowship.”

CEO of The Balnaves Foundation, Hamish Balnaves said: “The Balnaves family and Foundation are proud to support Mosman Art Gallery in this exciting initiative unique to the community. As a long-term resident who greatly admired the area, Neil’s personal art collection showcased the natural beauty and history of Mosman. These works were donated to the Gallery for the public to enjoy and this Fellowship builds on that gift by connecting it to Mosman’s heritage. It’s a tribute to my father’s contributions, his passion for the arts and making it accessible to all. It is truly wonderful to see the arts community embrace this new initiative and we are excited to see Mitch’s exhibition come to life”

About Mitch Cairns
Mitch Cairns (b. 1984, l. Gadigal Country/Sydney) is an artist whose distinctive painting practice balances a quickness and playfulness of improvised pictorial concepts with an unparalleled ability with his oil paint medium, rare in an artist of his generation. The surprising pairing of wit and discipline provides paint outcomes that are at once thin and flat but extraordinarily complex and subtle. For his subject matter, Cairns recounts a poetics of domestic/familial life where love, banality, self-reflection, eroticism, melancholy, anxiety provide ample image-ideas. On top of this foundation of the everyday, he builds homages to artist and literary heroes and other enthusiasms. Cairns often uses text as material for his work indebted to concrete poetry and spilling over to printmaking and collage, the domain of his extensive production on paper.

Cairns was awarded the Archibald Prize (2017) and the Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship (2012). In 2022, Cairns was the judge of the Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship and he curated Primavera: Young Australian Artists in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

Cairns has produced a number of artist books and serial publications: Pebble (2021—2024, with Mitchel Cumming), Selected Scuffs (2021), The Reader’s Voice (2015) and Dip or Skinny Dip (2014).

Image L-R: Diane Balnaves, Victoria Balnaves, Mayor of Mosman Ann Marie Kimber, Mitch Cairns, Marta Balnaves and Hamish Balnaves. Photo by Cassandra Hannagan.