The National 2021: New Australian Art

In his three paintings for The National 2021, Mitch Cairns conveys more or less the same thing with his visual puzzle picture poems. Edging more towards apocalyptic themes than falling leaves, Cairns conceived and commenced work on this new body of work last autumn, a period where the season’s tropes of death and decay threatened more ominously as we plunged into the lockdown of March 2020. As March 2021 rolls around and The National is delivered against the backdrop of this year’s iteration of the melancholic season, his paintings elegantly speak to time while abjuring the cliches that were quick to circulate in art made in the time of COVID-19. To even reference the pandemic feels like it will timestamp the work within a framework to which it relates but resists.

—Daniel Mudie Cunningham