Mitch Cairns: Artist's Mouth

Over the last twenty years, Gadigal/Sydney’s Mitch Cairns has emerged as a painter of flair and originality. He studied at the National Art School—when it was seen as the city’s conservative art school—graduating in 2006. His training was grounded in drawing, which he sees as the backbone of his work.

Cairns developed into a cool, calculating, intellectual painter, with a wry sense of humour. His puzzle pictures play with pictorial conventions and conundrums, showing lessons learnt from cubism, cartoons, and concrete poetry.

Cairns’ subjects relate to aspects of everyday modern life generally and to anecdotal personal experiences. His works feel simultaneously pop and retro. There’s a sense of pastiche, without explicit quotation. As Wes Hill writes, Cairns ‘engages less with tradition than with the anachronism of his obsessions, chasing offbeat images for the ages in our own foreboding times’.

Mitch Cairns: Artist’s Mouth is a joint project with National Art School Gallery, Gadigal/Sydney, curated by Lucy Latella at National Art School Gallery and Robert Leonard at the Institute of Modern Art.

—wall text IMA, Brisbane