Mosman Art Gallery and The Balnaves Foundation are pleased to announce artist Mitch Cairns as the inaugural recipient of The Neil Balnaves Fellowship.
Valued at $80,000 and in honour of the late 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 the legacy of Neil Balnaves and his longstanding commitment to Mosman's place in Australian art history, The Neil Balnaves Fellowship continues the fruitful partnership between the Gallery, the Balnaves family and The Balnaves Foundation. Together they 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 Neil Balnaves 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).
About Neil Balnaves AO
1944 - 2022
In 2006, Neil Balnaves AO founded The Balnaves Foundation. Already an established philanthropist, Neil wanted to create a pathway for intergenerational giving, bringing his family together to help create a better Australia through the arts, education and medicine.
Prior to establishing the Foundation, Neil had a long and successful career in the media industry, including founding the Southern Star Group in 1988. As a film and TV executive, Neil was proud to have been involved in bringing many popular shows to Australian screens, including Water Rats, Blue Heelers, Big Brother, The Secret Life of Us, McLeod's Daughters and Bananas in Pyjamas.
Neil was the Chairman of Ardent Leisure Group, one of Australia's most successful owners and operators of premium leisure assets, from 2003 until 2016. Other former directorships include Hanna-Barbara Australia, Reed Consolidated Industries, Hamlyn Group, Taft Hardie, Southern Star Group and
Southern Cross Broadcasting.
He was the Chancellor of Charles Darwin University, and a former Director and Trustee Member of Bond University, receiving an Honorary Doctorate of the Bond University in 2009. In addition, Neil was a Board Member of the Art Gallery of South Australia from 2013 to 2019, was a former member of the Advisory Council and Dean's Circle at the University of New South Wales Faculty of Medicine, and in 2010 received an Honorary Doctorate of the University of New South Wales.
Neil was immensely proud to be appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2010, for his services to the community through philanthropic support for the arts, education, medical research and Indigenous programs, and to business.
