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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.

Self portrait, 2024

Mitch Cairns

Darling Portrait Prize 2024 Finalist

oil on linen (support: 124.4cm x 104.2cm depth 6.0cm)

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
© The artist

Darling Portrait Prize 2024

© National Portrait Gallery 2024
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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia

Phone +61 2 6102 7000
ABN: 54 74 277 1196

The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. We respectfully advise that this site includes works by, images of, names of, voices of and references to deceased people.

This website comprises and contains copyrighted materials and works. Copyright in all materials and/or works comprising or contained within this website remains with the National Portrait Gallery and other copyright owners as specified.

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