The Art Show

With just a few lines and strokes, picture books hold whole worlds: joy and sorrow, memory and wonder. They can be stark, fun and beautiful, all at once. This week on The Art Show, we're celebrating the picture book as a subtle, serious art form — where image meets poetry and artists speak, not just to children, but to the child still inside us. Illustrator and writer Tull Suwannakit, Wiradjuri ar...

Five Acts of Love , now on at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, isn't a show about romance. It's about love when it's fierce, when it's fragile; when it lives inside grief, memory, resistance, and revolution. The practices of Megan Cope and Ali Tayhori stretch across Country, history, family and faith, reminding us that love isn't always gentle, but it's always alive.

When artists step into the theatre, the stillness of the studio meets the breath of the stage. And audiences, perhaps without even knowing, lean in. Illume is one of those collaborations, where Goolarrgon Bard visual artist Darrell Sibosado and Bangarra Dance Theatre's Artistic Director, Wirangu and Mirning woman, Frances Rings have made something luminous. In this work, light is used as more than...

Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is not just an art exhibition, but a field of ancestral presence. It's a space of authority and deep listening that shows what art can be when it is inseparable from land, from water, from Law, and from the unbroken chain of Yolŋu knowledge. It's also the featured Winter exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, an important ackn...

For much of the last century, in museums, the works of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists were treated as something outside the main story — consigned to a footnote of history or a side room in major galleries. A new exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art wants to put the record straight. Titled 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, it puts — front and centre — the remarkable...

From feminist beginnings to kitsch commercialism, minigolf has a rich history. But what happens when you let artists loose to design their own holes? Forget white walls and hushed tones—today we're heading to a golf course. Curator Grace Herbert explains the ideas behind Swingers , where putters are swapped for latex tails and square balls add a unique challenge.

Arcangelo Sassolino's work captures a suspended instant: just before collapse, just after ignition.  At the 2022 Venice Biennale, Sassolino paid homage to Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. But where Caravaggio painted light and shadow, Sassolino sculpts with fire and steel: molten light heated to 1500 degrees, falling from above into dark pools of water.  In his latest exhibition a...

Del Kathryn Barton exorcised her rage in her critically acclaimed feature film Blaze, but its aftermath is grief.  You wouldn't know it if you cast your eye around her Paddington studio: wide-eyed sylphs, sibyls and sages emerge from minutely detailed canvases where chequerboards, dots and strawberries are laden with new meaning.  Much like a cinema auteur, DKB is engaged in a world-building proje...

Jason Maling works in the expanded field where — through the interface of technology, screens and a sound system — the sonic and the visual are conducted before a live audience.  Diagrammatica was inspired by physics diagrams, but it's grown into a beast: part drawing, part durational performance and part musical composition.  And it all takes place underground — in a gallery known rather ominousl...

Recently on the show we met Filipino artist Pio Abad to hear about his Turner Prize nominated exhibition 'To Those Sitting in Darkness' which re-presented museum objects to reveal hidden histories and the deep legacies of colonialism.  Thai-Australian multidisciplinary artist Nathan Beard takes a different, less didactic, approach but, like Pio Abad, is working with cultural objects that are large...

Although he's one of Australia's most established, commercially successful and prolific artists, Dale Frank is a reluctant interview subject. Eccentric, reclusive, visionary, trailblazer — a sublime colourist, even a likeable arsehole — these are just some of the ways he's described. Which makes it even more remarkable that he agreed to be the subject of a documentary feature film — a rare thing f...

Sydney-based artist Nadia Vitlin works with olfaction — our sense of smell — infusing her artwork, whether it be clay or paint, to create bespoke pieces that mimic the transportive power of scent: one of the most evocative, deeply personal and memory-laden senses humans possess.  She experiments in the fourth dimension, and it all began with leaves from the garden and spices you might find in your...

Just as historical objects in museum collections embody certain histories — of British imperialism and modernity — they also map loss and disappearance for those in former colonial states. Pio Abad, whose work is "concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects," has mined the stories embedded in certain cultural material such as kris, ceremonial swords from Mindanao, and a tiar...

They used to lay-buy contemporary art together when they were low-paid gallery workers, forging a business relationship early on. Now, Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf are one of Australia's most successful art partnerships in terms of the cultural impact of the artists they represent — Tony Albert, Lindy Lee, Polly Borland, ex de Medici, Sam Leach, and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, to name a few....

It was while researching the provenance of a child’s boomerang, found in topsoil near the site of Melbourne Zoo, that Kimberley Moulton found the key to her curatorial vision for We Are Eagles, the latest edition of the TarraWarra Biennial.  The Yorta Yorta curator worked with artefacts and other historical material at Melbourne Museum for years before moving into contemporary art in her current r...

The Lebanese-born Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi joins The Art Show exclusively to talk about the profound impact of the decision to unceremoniously dump him as Australia's representative artist to the 2026 Venice Biennale.  The decision exposed the arts funding body Creative Australia to claims of political interference, racism and censorship — emptying Australia's Pavilion in Venice after our...

For Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall, art that isn't a catalyst for something—that isn't driven by critique of gatekeeping museums, the criminal justice system, or the wilful historical amnesia and complacency—isn't worth making.  Warraba has just unveiled his first institutional solo at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, laying bare his politics in a manifesto of simmering rage catalysed int...

In art, verisimilitude — representing things as they appear — is something like telling the unvarnished truth and it makes perfect sense that it's the form in which Vincent Fantauzzo is most comfortable.  His first commercial artworks were actually counterfeit 50 dollar notes, just one of the uncomfortable truths which he tells in his new autobiography, Unveiled.  Although his childhood in the out...

Robert Andrew's artwork features simple robotic machines, with a stylus that impulsively draws or leaves a trace; not so much artificial intelligence as incidental happenstance.  Although he works with technology, Andrew has always been deeply inspired by country. So it made sense that he was invited to make work for a new group exhibition at Bundanon, the timeless yet scarred landscape that figur...

Nici Cumpston has played a transformative role at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Over the past 16 years she has driven First Nations curatorial practice to new heights, shaping what began as a biennial exhibition into a festival of contemporary Indigenous art that surveys artmaking across the continent. As Tarnanthi reaches its tenth anniversary, Nici has accepted a new challenge overseas — b...

When questions were raised in Federal Parliament about two artworks by Khaled Sabsabi from 2006 and 2007, it was enough to convince Creative Australia to dump the artist from next year's Venice Biennale.  The board hoped to avoid a "prolonged and divisive" public debate, but the unparalleled move to rescind the invitation to Sabsabi to represent Australia risks creating has had the opposite effect...

Driven by their mission statement to create a queer wonderland, Will and Garett Huxley are true polymorphs.  A real-life couple who rival camp predecessors Gilbert and George, Will and Garett Huxley talk about their long-term collaboration and the transformation and reinvention that exemplifies queer experience.  Garrett speaks about finding his voice as a Gumbaynggir and Yorta Yorta person ahead...

After rising to prominence locally in the early 2000s, Ricky Swallow left Australia and built an international art career with his small-scale, often intimate bronzes.   Speaking from LA, Ricky talks about his unconscious move towards abstraction, his first foray into public art for Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, and the profound impact of the recent California fires.

What began as a living archive of queer Black British experience in the early 2000s has morphed into visual memoir for the interdisciplinary artist Topher Campbell. Told through three of his arthouse films including the uncompromising Fetish (2018) where he walks the streets of New York completely naked, an Afrofuturistic sculpture and intimate sound work composed of missed WhatsApp messages, Camp...

Latai Taumoepeau is an artist who thinks big. Not only is her subject matter expansive—the impact of global warming and rising sea levels in the South Pacific—increasingly she produces works of remarkable scale. Deep Communion sung in minor (ArchipelaGO, THIS IS NOT A DRILL) , which premiered at Venice as part of Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania and is now on at Artspace in Sydney, uses musical scores and sc...