The Art Show

The goddess of love has reigned supreme through Western art, but her roots are darker, more ancient and shape-shifting than you'd expect. Historian and TV presenter Prof Bettany Hughes joins Daniel to tell the surprising history of the powerful immortal. Plus, a seascape painter who lives on a yacht, and artist Khaled Sabsabi explores the exchange between spiritual belief and our human aspirations...

Meet the man behind the hit YouTube series Cocktails with a Curator, from The Frick in New York. Plus, what if the arts were on the nightly TV news, like sport? And artists respond to Matisse's Tahiti-inspired work in a new exhibition.

With a bower bird's habit of collecting found objects, Rosalie Gascoigne's sculptures were inspired by her surrounding natural environment. The final episode in this series of radio interviews with Australian women artists from the ABC archives.

An interview with sculptor and metal smith Mari Funaki, who was instrumental in getting Australian contemporary jewellery on the global map. The fifth episode in a pod-only series featuring interviews with women artists from the ABC archives.

A 2009 interview with the artist Margaret Olley, two years before her death. Part of our series featuring interviews with women artists from the ABC archives.

Interviews with women artists from the ABC archives. In 1979 Ivy Shore won Australia's richest art competition for women painters, for a portrait of trail blazing trade unionist Della Elliot.

Know My Name: interviews with women artists from the ABC archives. Hear Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, one of Australia's most renowned ceramicists, speaking to the ABC’s Julie Copeland in 1994.

Introducing Know My Name: interviews with women artists from the ABC archives. In this episode, hear from Grace Cossington Smith. A pioneer of modernism in Australia and one of the country’s most influential artists. Here she is interviewed in 1965 by Hazel de Berg for the National Library of Australia’s oral history collection.

What do artists think about when making huge public art? Lindy Lee is making the most expensive work commissioned by the NGA, and Judy Watson's bara will grace Sydney's harbour with a giant Gadigal fish hook. Then, the US art lab addressing the problem of confederate monuments to racist causes... and Indigenous artists Julie Gough, Nicholas Galanin and Yhonnie Scarce on Australia's own colonial me...

Globally and at home, artists are engaging with the reckoning happening around race and colonisation. But where do recent migrants and refugees to Australia fit into the dialogue?

It's 50 years since artists from Papunya began painting on board, heralding the Western Desert art movement, 'the last great art movement of the 20th Century' according to one famous critic. Plus, an artist's tribute to the iconic Leigh Bowery. A Japan-Australia photographic project featuring Mari Katayama. And Darwin's Street Art Festival brings new life to empty walls.

How does Francisco Goya help us make sense of the chaos of our contemporary world, and its depths of suffering? Then, discover art history through TikTok… and a contemporary sculpture powered by wind, water… and wine.

Do we turn a blind eye to the aggression and militarism — and colonialism — that defined the Italian Renaissance? Plus, hear why artist Vernon Ah Kee can't ignore a distinct Australian brand of racism, and whether a work by the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi found its way to 1970s Sydney.

How has social media giant Instagram changed how we experience art? Experts, artists and critics weigh in on the photo sharing platform, an evolution that's allowed artists to build careers outside of the gallery system, while drastically changing our consumption of art.

Maree Clarke is a key figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art. Her three-decade career has centred on the revival and sharing of culture. Plus, Jemima Wyman's collages using images from global protests. And visit the studio of acclaimed painter Craig Ruddy.

Artists in Afghanistan are facing a frightening future. Australian Hazara artists Khadim Ali and Elyas Alavi speak to Daniel about what’s happening in their homeland. There’s a lot of buzz about 'Murrnginy', a new exhibition by Yolngu artists from Yirrkala, who have swapped stringybark for scrap metal. The works take a stunning contemporary direction on an ancient practice.

Meet the Turner Prize-nominated UK art collective Cooking Sections, making art about the food we eat, ecology and geopolitics. Plus, how Kathy Temin came to use fake fur for her large-scale monuments to memory. And a new book delves into the elusive Ian Fairweather's love of Chinese art and language.

Anne Wallace paints film-like scenes of intimacy and psychological tension that speak to iso life and the female gaze. Plus, the ancient tomb art in Southern Italy that told an unexpected story of burial in the Classical world. And a new generation of artists from Western Arnhem Land in a new exhibition of exquisite art created on stone country.

A new biography of the post-Impressionist artist Hilda Rix Nicholas looks at the unusual life and sometimes overlooked career of a great Australian painter. Artist and designer W.H. Chong on the secret behind the perfect book cover. And this year’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards (NATSIAAs).