The Art Show

Art historian Huey Copeland is hard at work on what he says will be “the first gender-balanced and racially integrated history of Western modernism”. Daniel speaks with Huey about the overlooked stories behind some of the best known paintings in the Western canon. Australian cartoonist and illustrator Mandy Ord makes the mundane profound, with trademark wit and touching humour. She speaks with Ros...

Three women and three artists with three very different ways of looking at the world: Kelly Koumalatsos  has a book ( Madjem Bambandila ) that charts three and half decades of her art practice (including possum skin cloak making) that is always embedded in culture. At 82, abstract painter Lesley Dumbrell has her first career survey at a major state gallery, Lesley Dumbrell: Thrum . And Claudia Nic...

She’s an artist whose medium is fashion. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen is an innovator, remaking high fashion to be wearable art - fabric is almost plastic in her hands, moulding and shaping it so that it becomes a sculptural form. The first designer to ever 3D print a dress, her atelier in Amsterdam is more like a problem-solving incubator. She trained with Alexander McQueen, and like him there’...

What does a historic bark painting from Arnhem Land have to do with manganese, the metal that makes lustrous gold and liquid black ceramic glazes? It’s one of the tangents in American interdisciplinary artist Candice Lin 's first solo exhibition in Australia, along with cat-led tours, wolf’s urine and the sea cucumber, the aphrodisiac fished for hundreds of years in the waters of northern Australi...

Fashion is not a luxury; it’s a crucial part of the social fabric of many African countries. Capturing this diversity in an exhibition was the monumental task for Christine Checinska, the Senior Curator of African Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum, UK. Africa Fashion is touring the world, bringing diverse voices from the African diaspora to the forefront. Among these voices...

A culture that flourished 3,500 years ago in Thailand. They made jewellery and ceramics, not war.  You may never have heard of Ban Chiang  —That’s possibly because the objects that tell the story of this fascinating archaeological site are in limbo, caught between voracious collectors, tomb-raiding locals and undercover federal agents. Art historian Dr Melody Rod-ari  tells Daniel the story.  For...

Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.

Big-name conceptual artist - four words you don’t often hear together. But Jeremy Deller is one - he’s a household name in Britain, but a few years back he sparked controversy here when he made giant wax candles of Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan, and let them burn. The Turner Prize-winning artist also orchestrates mass public spectacles that bridge the worlds of contemporary art and pop culture. D...

We remember the life of the iconic artist Destiny Deacon, with curator Natalie King, and a cast of friends who sent us voice memos. She was the first artist to creatively reuse Aboriginal kitsch - and to make it the stuff of high art. A cultural icon, she was an outlier - a quirk of the artworld - whose strikingly original vision and prolific output found her an international audience. Plus, a stu...

Kimberley Moulten, an adjunct curator at  Britain's Tate gallery, specialising in First Nations art and Kate ten Buuren, a Taungurung curator, walk us through the public installation Blak Infinite for Melbourne's winter arts festival, RISING. The artist  Destiny Deacon , who passed away last week, first coined 'Blak' to reclaim a word often weaponised against Aboriginal people in Australia. Rosa s...

Cressida Campbell and Margaret Preston (1875-1963): two beloved printmakers inspired by Ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodcut genre whose influence swept through western art. Rosa speaks to Cressida and Geelong Gallery senior curator Lisa Sullivan about Ukiyo-e and Preston, for a new exhibition connecting all three printmaking styles. Art History professor  Roger Benjamin  joins us to talk about the Gina...

Daniel meets the British filmmaker and artist Sir  John Akomfrah , who is representing the UK at the Venice Biennale with his work Listening All Night to Rain . Mentors can have many guises. For Miriwoong artist Jan Griffiths, Tiwi artist Johnathon World Peace Bush and Gomeroi Yinarr  artist Sophie Honess, they each chose someone who could offer them artistic guidance as well as cultural knowledge...

Damien Linnane was serving a prison sentence when he took up art as mental health therapy, going on to edit the magazines for prisoners Paper Chained  and working on a PhD. Damien is the curator of a new art exhibition at Boom Gate Gallery at Sydney's Long Bay gaol, showing art from people incarcerated around the world. My Thing...is using art to talk about gambling harm. All his life,   Nelson Ng...

Saudi-Palestinian artist Dana Awartani studied at a famously conceptual art school, before learning traditional Islamic crafts and principles, like sacred geometry. Now Dana is exploring the destruction of build heritage in the Arab world, most recently the devastated city of Gaza. Her work is being shown at Adelaide's Samstag Museum of Art  and at the Venice Biennale . Rosa visits the Melbourne s...

Archie Moore  has won the top honour at one of the world's most prestigious and oldest art festivals – the Venice Biennale--  for a monumental work showing thousands of years of family lineage, and invoking lives lost under the colonial state. Monsignor Alberto Rocca is an Italian priest and art curator who has a singular job: accompanying pages from  Leonardo Da Vinci 's Codex Atlanticus, to the...

Nicholas Mangan is drawn to the stories behind some of our most contentious commodities: phosphate from Nauru, copper from Bougainville and cryptocurrency, which Nick compares to an ancient form of stone money from Yap, a Micronesian island. Nick takes the viewer into these histories through sculptural installations and intriguing films. His survey exhibition World Undone is now on at the Museum o...

Visnja Brdar's art motto is “The more nothing, the better”. She is one of this country’s most internationally successful graphic designers, the child of Croatian migrants who took her solo agency from Melbourne to New York,  head-first into the competitive world of international branding -- and she's the subject of the first significant art survey of a female graphic designer in Australia,  Visnja...

Katy Hessel's podcast and bestselling book on the  great women artists  ride the wave of interest in a parallel cannon of art, where women have long been missing. So, what sparked her work correcting the record, and what has changed since she started? Katy is appearing at Sydney Writers Festival and other book events in Australia in May. Ellen Dahl  ventured out to a frozen archipelago in the Arct...

Australia's art resale royalty scheme was supposed to help artists (or their families) get a small percentage when paintings were re-sold at auction for big bucks, particularly Indigenous artists. But it hasn't gone according to plan. ABC national business reporter Emilia Terzon tells Daniel about her year-long investigation into what many says is an unjust state of affairs. For four decades Judy...

Interviewing visual artists is just one of the things that Jennifer Higgie has mastered in her decades-long career at the helm of Frieze magazine, as a writer, reviewer and podcast host. Daniel speaks with London-based Jennifer as her new podcast series for the National Gallery of Australia is released. Listen to Jennifer and Daniel's conversation about women artists and the spirit world . In 2007...

Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.

We meet the Maori artist who’s single-handedly reviving the lost cultural tradition of barkcloth making. As a right-wing conservative government winds back the prevalence of Maori culture and the teaching of Te Reo Maori, Nikau Hindin  is collaborating with artists from across the Great Ocean for the Biennale of Sydney . She explains the complexities and risks in trying to breathe new life into a...

Maria Madeira  escaped the Indonesian invasion of Timor Leste in 1975, to end up in a refugee camp in Portugal. In 2005 she returned as the first artist to hold a solo exhibition there, ever. Now the artist, who came to Australia in 1983, is representing Timor Leste at the Venice Biennale . A fountain of drool, the realities of catheter bags and people 'seeing but pretending not to see':  Yucky  i...

Emeka Ogboh  used years of field recordings to create layered soundscapes of his hometown, Lagos in Nigeria. When he moved to Berlin, he added music and combined the sounds of both global cities in critically acclaimed albums. Now Emeka is in nipaluna / Hobart for Mona Foma , where he's making work with the locals – including 2023 Tasmanian of the Year John Kamara . My Thing is... the chickenosaur...

So, you're given the keys to Australia's largest visual art festival, what next? Romanian-born curator Cosmin Costinas and Colombian Inti Guerrero are the co-directors of the Sydney Biennale. The art power couple tell us how they got to know Australian art and how they selected 116 artists from dozens of countries to showcase a world of contemporary art in this year's Biennale Ten Thousand Suns ....