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

Cairns is a cool, calculating, intellectual painter, with a sense of humour. His work interweaves elements drawn from cubism, comics, and concrete poetry. His puzzle pictures play games with pictorial conventions and conundrums. Like a classic cubist, his subject matter 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 feel simultaneously pop and retro. His subjects often relate to his personal experiences and to aspects of everyday modern life generally. Recent paintings feature lamps, shoes, and a giant letter E; a car and jet planes; 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 in his text paintings, his Letraset works on paper, and vinyl-letter works on mirrors. For the 2022 Adelaide Biennial, he presented a massive vinyl wall-text mural, featuring permutations of simple sentences, with dizzying if tiny differences in phraseology.

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