The Art Show

Most artists like to protect their work from the elements, but Sophie Cape, the winner of the 2025 Hadley's Art Prize, explains how exposing her work to dirt, rainfall, and her own body is an essential part of the process. Filipino artist Pio Abad talks post-colonial loss, disappearance and re-imagining. And filmmaker Danielle Maclean on her documentary about the impact and legacy of one of Austra...

UK interdisciplinary artist Topher Campbell opens up his Ruckus Heart…a powerful and immersive multi-room exhibition at the Tate Modern earlier this year. Curator Kimberley Moulton shares how a child’s boomerang led her to discover what was essentially a human zoo, ultimately informing her curatorial vision for the Tarrawarra Biennial - We Are Eagles. And Julie Fragar on her 2025 Archibald Prize-w...

She took a wallpaper with an idealised view of history and turned it into something far more moving - in every sense of the word. Meet Lisa Reihana, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most acclaimed artists. Ben Law - writer, broadcaster and man about town, opens up about the artist that’s changed his life - photographer William Yang. And Campbell Addy - who has photographed everyone from Naomi Campbel...

This week we speak to the Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino, whose current MONA exhibition features dripping molten steel and showers of light.  Joanne Sullivan and Ursula Strumpf - co-founders of one of Australia’s most successful commercial galleries - reflect on 20 years of working together. And what does an artist see in their work, and in the world around them? Writer and art critic Quenti...

Three artists in their prime talk to The Art Show... CJ Hendry specialises in hyper-real paintings, but she’s just as comfortable with the art of the spectacle as she is creating the art itself - her recent showcase exhibition in NY got shut down because it drew too many people. Fellow expat Ricky Swallow has been taking LA by storm with his striking bronze sculptures, but is returning home for hi...

Nell, who has a major retrospective at Heide Museum , speaks to Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran about ghost motifs, smiling poop, and how collaborative projects have changed her perspective on art. The Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson speaks to Rosa Ellen about a project he undertook to document the glaciers and glacial rivers of Iceland over two decades. You can see Presence , a major collection of his...

In episode 3 of the series Dangerously Modern, we're following the journey of the magnificent Dorrit Black. Dorrit arrived in London in 1927 and embraced modernism in the new medium of lino cut printmaking. She went on to start her own Modern Art Centre in Sydney in the 1930s and inspired the next generation of artists. But professional rivalry and her status as an ‘unmarried daughter’ would chall...

In episode 2 of the series Dangerously Modern we follow the painter Stella Bowen, who left Adelaide for Europe and was part of a storied avant-garde art scene in Paris in the 1920s.  Overseas, a young Stella met the writer Ford Maddox Ford, a relationship that sparked her intellectually but ultimately sabotaged her own career. It wasn't until she struck out on her own as a single mother, that Stel...

In the early 20th century, an unprecedented wave of women artists  left a conservative Australia to pursue modern art in Europe. Margaret Preston is a household name in Australian art, best known for her bold paintings and woodcuts of native wildflowers. But to achieve this level of visibility she had to inhabit a bullet-proof confidence and find a sense of freedom, away from the strictures of a V...

Every spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art hands its galleries to the next generation. Primavera becomes a testing ground: a place where young artists bend, stretch, and spark new ways of seeing. This year’s edition, curated by Tim Riley Walsh, circles around ideas of the made and the manufactured: how things are assembled, engineered, cobbled together, whether objects, identities, or whole worl...

Sisters Anney and Mechelle Bounpraseuth grew up in a world that promised paradise later. But they chose otherwise, leaving their religion to begin making paradise now! For Anney, cloth and sequins became radiant scenes of joy and survival. And for Mechelle, cans of lychees and jars of Tiger Balm, forged in clay, carry memory and care. Their work carries grief and humour, kitsch and devotion, and m...

Leigh Bowery was not a man you could overlook. Born in Sunshine, Melbourne, he left Suburbia for Soho, London, remaking himself into someone impossible to contain. At the club Taboo, he was ringmaster of chaos. For artist Lucian Freud, muse. For the queer underground, Leigh was revelation: proof that life itself could be spectacle, and spectacle survival. Tate Modern’s recent exhibition Leigh Bowe...

What would it mean to eat breakfast with a Brett Whiteley or to pass a Sally Gabori in the corridor? Art, not as something you visit, but something that visits you? That's the idea behind Artbank, a federal experiment that began in 1980 and now holds more than 11,000 works of Australian contemporary art. Works that circulate into offices, foyers, and living rooms; into the lives of people who migh...

To look at the art of Tschabala Self is to feel fabric think. Stitched velvet, printed cotton, painted skin: bodies collaged from memory and from life, all the way from Harlem to the Hudson. The characters that Tschabalala Self paints aren't just portraits, they fold together myth and the everyday They ask how we see and how we're seen.  In Melbourne for her solo exhibition, Skin Tight at ACCA, Se...

Some landscapes don't just surround us, they get inside us. A windswept farm, a rugged coastline, a cave heavy with shadow: they're places that don't fade, but lodge in the memory. The work of photographer and video artist Sarah Rhodes , who was part of the ABC's Top 5 Arts program in 2025, explores the emotional registers of place: how landscapes can be more than just backdrops, and can instead b...

To write about art is really to write about looking. About how artists meet the world: what they notice; what slips through; what remains. In What Artists See , Quentin Sprague turns to twelve Australian artists, but Sprague doesn't just list their works, he lingers with how they see: what pulls at their attention and what do they uncover when the world pushes back? Speaking with Micheal Do, Quent...

Two hundred years ago, a French wallpaper pictured the Pacific: the islands and empire in perfect harmony against windless calm seas. But it was decoration. Pure fantasy. Until artist Lisa Reihana made history flicker — adding ceremony, desire, misunderstanding, and violence. Her vast video work In Pursuit of Venus [infected] premiered in Auckland, then at the New Zealand Pavilion at the 2017 Veni...

Nusra Latif Qureshi has built a career extending South Asian painting traditions while pressing on empire, displacement, and desire — revealing how power cloaks itself in colour, and how history leaves its mark on objects. The House of Irredeemable Objects at MUMA brings together thirty years of Nusra Latif Qureshi’s work — an examination of tradition, history, and the everyday —  alongside a new...

Some paintings are sealed off from the world: neat, polished, contained. But Sophie Cape's canvases feel porous, weathered by the elements themselves. Not so much painted, as unearthed. Once an elite athlete, Sophie turned to art after devastating injuries. It's a path that has brought her attention and acclaim, including winning this year's Hadley's Art prize, Australia's richest prize for landsc...

Throughout his practice, the German artist Thomas Demand rebuilds the world in paper, meticulously constructing life-sized models of everyday spaces or scenes. Te scene is photographed, and the models destroyed. Demand is in Australia as the curator of the 38th Kaldor Public Art Project and here, it is the exhibition itself that becomes the artwork. Inspired by a work by Sol LeWitt, Demand has rec...

Nicolas Rothwell writes at the edges of things. He's twice won the Prime Minister's Literary Award — for both fiction and non-fiction — and his work slides between both registers: fiction brushes against fact, philosophy slips into story. His latest novel, Yilkari: A Desert Suite, written with his wife, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, takes readers deep into the Western Desert, showing how Country ma...

William Yang's photographs are part memoir, part invitation. Queer lives, Asian faces, vanished places — all lit with the soft glow of attention. For writer and broadcaster Benjamin Law discovering Yang's work felt uncanny. Like recognition. Like fate. The sense that someone, somewhere, had lived a version of his life and turned it into light. For Law, it wasn't just admiration. It was kinship. Tw...

In 2020, Aperture magazine invited Garth Greenwell to write about Mark Armijo McKnight's photographs. The images immediately captivated him, offering new possibilities for thinking and feeling. Their work meets in shared spaces: the erotic, the poetic, desire and restraint, silence and shadow; both illuminating queer lives with honesty and complexity. What began as an assignment deepened into a de...

Scott Burton made art that touched the body before the mind. But like so many artists and men of his generation, he died of AIDS in 1989. Before he passed, he willed everything to the Museum of Modern Art — his work, his archive, his name — what followed was a slow erasure. Now, journalist Julia Halperin explores how Burton's legacy , once forgotten, is being reclaimed. And Janet Dawson, at 90, is...

Children live in a world not quite built for them and, for a long time, galleries were no exception. No touching. No talking. Just stand and receive. But, something is changing. Across Australia, galleries are beginning to meet children where they are — not just as visitors, but as artists in their own right. Tamsin Cull, head of public engagement at QAGOMA and Lilly Blue, head of learning and cre...