The first major survey exhibition of accomplished Mornington Peninsula artist John Baird, the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery presents The Authentic Consequence: Forty years of John Baird from 6 September – 16 November 2025.
Tracing Baird’s development from his beginnings as an emerging artist in Melbourne to his most recent paintings, drawings and sculptures, this exhibition includes a mini-tableau comprising paintings, hand-built furniture and associated table-top sculptures; a wall of inspirations and musings; and a group of new paintings produced especially for this show.
John began his working life as a studio assistant for prominent modernist artist Leonard French, known for the iconic glass ceiling at the National Gallery of Victoria. French’s collection of Pre-Columbian art and strict working regime had a lasting influence. He advised Baird to construct a painting as if you were pressing the image up against a sheet of glass, arranging objects and motifs in a shallow space – a concept upon which Baird based his own art.
Baird’s early association with Roar Studios in Melbourne is evident in the artist’s simplified forms and choice of everyday subject matter. Reacting against both mid-century abstraction and burgeoning conceptualism, the group drew on the work of French painter Dubuffet and Australian figurative expressionists to emphasise a primitive style and an expressive mood. Baird’s other significant influences include Pre-Columbian art, English Arts and Crafts design, and Synthetic Cubism, as well as artists such as Marc Chagall, Margaret Preston and Dorothy Braund.
Baird has lived on the Mornington Peninsula since 1994. He’s had access to studios in Sorrento, including the top floor of the Continental Hotel. The seaside location and elevated perspectives inspired Baird to paint Port Phillip Bay from Sorrento, Mount Martha and Arthurs Seat. As well as his seascape paintings, he paints interiors and still lifes.
More recently, he’s been creating three-dimensional pieces, including furniture made in conjunction with Greg Durrant and, later, bronze sculptures based on floral designs. He’s also collaborated with Mornington Peninsula artists Gordon Hickmott, Judi Singleton and Peter Ferguson on painted ceramics.
In the 2010s, Baird alternated his yearly exhibitions between Eastgate and Holst in Melbourne and Arthouse Gallery in Sydney. Inspired by both cities, and his love of boats and sailing, Baird focused on the contrast between Sydney Harbour and Port Phillip Bay.
The exhibition also presents a very personal portrait of Baird recovering from a heart transplant in 2017, opposite a portrait of his father who passed away the same year. These sombre paintings are a reflection on mortality, life and death and being given a second chance. Around this time, Baird started to recreate moments of synaesthesia, shifting his vivid imagination into hyperdrive and creating paintings that took a fixed reality into the realm of dreams.
The Authentic Consequence features over 60 paintings and objects and is supported by an artist talk and a 2-day painting workshop at John’s studio.
The Authentic Consequence: Forty years of John Baird
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery – Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington
Exhibition: 6 September – 16 November 2025
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.mprg.mornpen.vic.gov.au for details.
Images: John Baird, Dancing Floral (Klimt Vase), 2024, synthetic polymer paint, Blackwood veneer wallpaper, Private Collection | John Baird, Sydney in the Rain, 2022, acrylic and shellac on board, Private Collection, Courtesy of the artist and Arthouse Gallery, Sydney | John Baird in the studio – photo by Jim Geer