REVIEW | Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs

Sydney-based artist Mitch Cairns exhibits a compelling project of recent oil paintings, bronze casts, new works on paper, and sculpture presented in the soaring central space of Wollongong Art Gallery. Clever, playful, and complex juxtapositions articulate the gallery spaces in a coherent visual and linguistic flow.

Installation view details, Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs, 2025, series 'Distant Image,' 2024–25, Wollongong Art Gallery, Wollongong, New South Wales. Photographed by Silversalt.

Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs was commissioned for the Contemporary Projects series at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, where it was first presented in early 2025. Cairns is no stranger to the AGNSW, having won the Archibald Prize in 2017 with a portrait of partner and fellow artist Agatha Gothe-Snape, but Restless Legs was his first solo exhibition in the new galleries of Naala Badu.

The project’s central theme emerged when the artist experienced restless legs while trying to read in bed. Interrupting his focus, the experience aligned with his broader concerns around the transmission of information and its disruption, alongside literary interests, language, and text.

Cairns says it took him nine to ten months to make the work for the exhibition, and the process was mostly intuitive. The images came to him “at the speed they wanted to come.”

Cairns finds humour and magic in the world around his Rozelle studio; his creative process is sparked by observations of ordinary life, nature, still life, industry, landscape, the built environment, music, literature, and more. Restless Legs includes eight striking oil paintings, all 2024, immediately recognisable for their stylised imagery, refined brushwork and a restricted colour palette of sheer, almost shimmering translucent colours. Cairns’ 2023 exhibition Free TAFE & Railway Cake presented at The Commercial, Sydney included Self-portrait w/Reading Lamp, in which the artist is portrayed as a very leafy tree.  This idea was explored earlier in Self-portrait as a Lemon Tree, 2020.  Cairns has been reading Italo Calvino’s 1963 book Marcovaldo and identifies with its title character’s affinity with the natural world. Self-portrait as a pair of bookends, which introduces the exhibition in Wollongong, sees the artist portrayed as a floral still life. Others of the self-portrait series in this exhibition, include a bookmark, and restless legs.  More broadly, what we think we recognise in these paintings can readily shift, here Cairns is evoking sensibilities or identities through poetic chains of association.

Installation view, Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs, 2025, showing Self Portrait as a pair of restless legs, Wollongong Art Gallery, Wollongong, New South Wales. Photographed by Silversalt.

Self-portrait as a pair of restless legs depicts a pair of soaring chimney stacks with characteristic wafts of fabric-like smoke or clouds. With no resemblance to physical likeness, Cairns’s self-portraits appear to subtly intercept the traditional portraiture genre, alluding instead to the artist’s ideas and imagination. In 9-5, smoking stacks appear as cigarettes in a surreal landscape with an enormous “9” and “5.”  Life-like features a larger-than-life bedside lamp and a pair of floating open books—referencing the artist’s interrupted focus while reading with restless legs.

A selection of nine wall-mounted bronze works in dark patina offers a counterpoint to the high visibility of the paintings. Smaller in scale, at a distance they appear like dense, rectangular windows. The bronzes are cast from wax forms into which the artist has stamped printer’s typographic letters, both for the visual effect and poetic pleasure.

Installation view details, Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs, 2025, Wollongong Art Gallery, Wollongong, New South Wales. Photographed by Silversalt.

At close range, we read a range of associations, comprising familial, as in the Face of Man plate, 2024, which transcribes a 1970s gift voucher for Sydney’s first male-only beauty clinic whose enterprising proprietor was the artist’s grandmother. The sparsely laid-out text begins “AT LAST A / SKIN / CARE / SALON / EXCLUSIVELY FOR MEN. . . .” Other plates such as Rousseau Plate, Declarative Plate, and Place Marker plate (for Roland), all 2024, reward careful viewing even if their meanings may float in and out of receptivity. Visitors to Restless Legs at Wollongong Art Gallery can further explore the artist’s love of wordplay and poetics in a small-edition artist booklet by Mitch Cairns published by the Gallery. Titled Link thru open space to Robert Street, this 1notebook format includes the artist’s writings and transcriptions of the cast bronze texts. 

Seed, 2025, is a striking six-metre timber and steel sculpture, a re-purposed power pole. During the exhibition’s preparation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, staff inquired of the artist if gallery seating was required, or desired. Around that time in the streets near the artist’s studio, work was underway to replace the transmission poles and lines. The allure of the pole, which previously transmitted telephone calls, provided a perfect solution to the bench-seat quandary; here was a compelling readymade, conceptually aligned with the exhibition’s core theme of the transmission of ideas, words, and visual language. Braced with steel plates and supported on two I-beams, Seed is a pared-back, minimal and elegant sculptural intervention made in collaboration with his partner’s father, sculptor Michael Snape.

Restless legs was augmented with new work for Wollongong. Cairns spent his teenage years in the Illawarra, his first encounters with painting were at the Wollongong Art Gallery. This special connection and the Gallery’s unique, imposing central hexagonal space and mezzanine level merited a site-specific response.

Installation view details, Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs, 2025, showing ‘Seed,’ Wollongong Art Gallery, Wollongong, New South Wales. Photographed by Silversalt.

In Wollongong, Seed traverses the central space in a dynamic visual relationship with the Gallery’s robust columns and its solid timber parquetry floor. A new suite of eight individually framed linocut and vinyl works on paper, collectively titled Distant Image, 2024–25, considers the significance and influence of artists such as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Robert MacPherson and their interest in the vernacular.  

Upstairs in the narrow mezzanine level is an unmissable group of work, seemingly a postscript that responds to the opportunity the architecture offers. Working drawing, 2024, comprises six sketches that demonstrate Cairns’s exceptional competence with pencil on paper. The final flourish on this level is a readymade. Titled Working drawing, 2025, a sheet of blackboard is fitted into the recess of a standard 1970s public building office door. This door appears functional, but in reality, it is not one that visitors can pass through to exit the balcony. It is highly unlikely any visitor will try that door, rather they recoil and retrace their steps back the way they came. Written in white chalk in a neat cursive hand, it bears the words “Income Tax Man.”  With unique wit and no apparent trace of effort, Cairns conveys the humour and pathos of daily life with an uninhibited imagination and poetic sense.

EXHIBITION
Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs
6 September – 30 November 2025
Wollongong Art Gallery, New South Wales

Images courtesy of the artist, Wollongong Art Gallery, Wollongong, New South Wales

This article was first published in Artist Profile Issue 73