Self portrait, 2024

Mitch Cairns is an Archibald Prize-winning artist whose deft handling of the painted surface anchors a dynamic and often playful arrangement of pictorial concepts. A finalist in the National Portrait Gallery’s 2024 Darling Portrait Prize, Self portrait draws together Cairns’ established portraiture practice with his ongoing pursuit of the poetic form that can be found in everyday, familial objects and spaces. While his approach lingers in the figurative, Cairns flirts with a pseudo-cubist organisation of form and space that sees objects fold into crisp lines and the proportions of a room dismantled.

Although we are denied an image of the artist’s face in this self portrait, the figure is surrounded by the props of a painter: a paintbrush lies horizontally, curls of what might be white paper litter the floor, and a mirror hangs on a wall. Cairns describes the work as ‘a record of how I approach a painting with the limited means I have at my disposal and the belief that in obscuring my face I might achieve another type of likeness, one that documents the ongoing task of re-tethering myself to the picture-making process’. 

Purchased 2024
© Mitch Cairns