Mitch Cairns returns to the National Art School with The Artist’s Mouth. After graduating twenty years ago, he presents his most comprehensive body of work to date.
In the preceding years, he has established himself as a leading Australian artist. He won the prestigious Archibald Prize in 2017 with a quirky and intimate portrait of artist and partner Agatha Gothe-Snape. His unique, uncompromising style crosses painting, sculpture, printmaking and concrete poetry.
His work has wit, humour and irony. His slightly muted colours combine like musical notes, becoming beautifully colourful, even carnivalesque. There is a joyous playfulness here as he creates dreamlike images from the everyday.
You may be dazzled at first by the technical, rigorous handling of his mediums. Edges are clean and precise. Within them, forms are articulated in random, almost flippant renderings; some flat, like hard-edged patterns, others transparent and softly graded. You are seduced by their quirky mastery. It’s as if Mitch is playing with the idea of painting. The process of constructing an image becomes a subject in his works. Even the construction of a stretched canvas is dealt with in wild, untamed angles and shapes. The process becomes the painting.
His use of text to create imagery is also disarming. A large gallery wall is covered in multiple repetitions of four-line verse, continually rearranged. This small pool of labels, exponentially multiplied, was garnered from an uncle’s Polaroids. Is there meaning here, or is there a refusal to define? Are these patterns for the sake of patterns? Meanwhile, snippets of images show themselves like the instant snap of a Polaroid.
Often described as an artist’s artist, Mitch actively supports other artists through his operation of gallery spaces adjacent to his studio. This allows for work that is not immediately commercially accessible to be shown, and gives time and space for experimentation outside a mainstream context. No wonder he is so highly regarded by his peers, as he quietly fosters communities around the practice of art.
As fellow artist Elizabeth Pulie writes in her introduction to the show, “while his images and words come from the artist’s mind and the artist’s mouth, the generosity shown in his broader practice comes from the artist’s heart.”
Mitch Cairns, The Artist’s Mouth, is on at the NAS Gallery until 11 July 2026.
