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Phillipe Blake—10 November 2026·2 min read
Brisbane's inner-city voice since 2014
Brisbane's inner-city voice since 2014
Packer's Prize winner Matthew Cheyne opens Picnic at Black and White Mountain at Mitchell Fine Art on 17 November, a show of monkeys, volcanoes and confetti about order, chaos and colour.
Matthew Cheyne, an award-winning painter from Ipswich, took the Packer's Prize at this year's Brisbane Portrait Prize, for George Gittoes after Grünewald. On 17 November he opens a show at Mitchell Fine Art in Fortitude Valley. It is full of monkeys, volcanoes and confetti.
The gallery adds that he made this year's Stanthorpe Art Prize finalists. His show, Picnic at Black and White Mountain, runs to 19 December. Entry is free.
The subjects look unrelated, and that is the point. Cheyne sets them side by side to ask how we read the world around us.
His paintings sit where the wish for order meets a world that refuses it. One moment they feel like a museum or a zoo, where everything is managed. The next they show nature at full force, which cannot be managed at all. Viewers are left questioning what they took for granted.
Cheyne takes his ideas from people, chance meetings and the streets and buildings around him. The humour he finds in modern life's contradictions runs dark. The scenes are playful and a little uneasy. They look at how we sort, interpret and try to control what surrounds us.
Colour is where the tension builds. The gallery says being colour blind informs his choices, and that he leans into unexpected pairings and sharp contrasts. The result is a gap between what a painting shows and how the eye takes it in.
In Black and White Monkeys, three monkeys sit on and around a stack of open boxes under a blue sky. In Confetti Volcano, an eruption of pink, blue and teal throws off round blobs of yellow, orange and green. Both are oil on linen from this year.
Black and White Monkeys (103 x 85cm) and Confetti Volcano (81 x 71cm), both oil on linen, 2026.
The title comes from a search. Cheyne is looking for what he calls a "picnic spot", a neutral place from which to watch opposing forces without being swallowed by either. Here is how he puts it: "If I can just view it from the appropriate vantage point, the volcano is beautiful and terrifying, a god to be feared and a geological phenomenon to be studied." He says so in the gallery's release.
The word picnic is not new for him. His 2021 show at the same gallery was called Picnic.
Cheyne has also lived in Germany, and in France. The gallery says he has held shows in Cologne, Berlin and Luxembourg. In Australia, Ipswich Regional Art Gallery has hung his work, as have Casula Powerhouse in Sydney and the National Archives in Canberra.
Two free events sit inside the run. Cheyne opens the show on Friday 20 November from 5.30pm to 7pm. He gives an artist talk on Saturday 5 December at 11am.
Picnic at Black and White Mountain
Photography: Caroline Cheyne
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