The Institute of Modern Art is joining forces with the National Art School Gallery in Gadigal/Sydney to present a survey exhibition of Mitch Cairns.

Over the last twenty years, Cairns has emerged as a major Australian painter of flair and originality. His playful work interweaves elements of cubism, comics, and concrete poetry.

Cairns is a cool, calculating, intellectual painter, with a sense of humour. He produces puzzle pictures, playing games with pictorial conventions. He enjoys pictorial conundrums—duck/rabbit problems. He scrambles 3D forms and 2D ones, detailed forms and schematic ones. Like a classic cubist, his subject is sometimes hidden—it’s not always immediately clear what we’re looking at.

In Cairns’s work, there’s a sense of pastiche, without explicit quotation. His works manage to feel simultaneously pop and retro. His subjects often relate to his personal experiences and to aspects of modern life generally. Recent paintings feature lamps, shoes, and a giant letter E; a car and Concorde; cigarettes and clouds. 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’.

From the outset, language has been a big part of Cairns’s project, linking his work with concrete poetry and conceptualism. This can be seen not only in his witty text paintings, but in his Letraset works on paper, vinyl-letter works on mirrors, and letter-punch works cast in bronze. For the 2022 Adelaide Biennial, he presented a massive mural featuring permutations of simple sentences, exploring dizzying if tiny differences in phraseology.

Cairns’s studied at the National Art School, when it was seen as the city’s conservative art school. His training was grounded in drawing, which became the backbone of his work. He graduated in 2006. Today, NAS proudly claims this alum as a success story. Artist’s Mouth will celebrate twenty years since he graduated along with the twenty-year anniversary of the NAS Gallery.

Bringing together over fifty works, Artist’s Mouth has been curated by Lucy Latella at NAS Gallery and Robert Leonard at the IMA. It will be shown first at NAS Gallery, 1 May–11 July 2026. The accompanying publication will feature essays by the curators, and Kate Lilley and Wes Hill.