The Art Show

Helen Molesworth  is a curator and writer who became widely known for her hit podcast Death of an Artist , about the artist Ana Mendieta, whose husband sculptor Carl Andre was charged then acquitted of her murder in the 1980s. Carl Andre died last week, and Helen has a book of collected art writing out: Open Questions: Thirty years of writing about art . Daniel visits the backyard studio of Olana...

When you see a David Shrigley  picture – at worst, you’ll chuckle, at best you’ll laugh out loud every time you think of it (which is sometimes years later.) The Shrigley universe is filled with badly drawn hands, everyday disappointment, and simple pleasures. In short, it’s sublimely silly and pretty dark. Daniel speaks with the British artist during his Australian visit for the National Gallery...

Tacita Dean is one of the UK's most acclaimed artists, best known for working with 16mm analogue film. Daniel speaks with her about recent work on important living artists, and her huge, mesmerising chalk drawings, from her exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art . My Thing is... getting squished. Actor and choreographer  Smac McCreanor  went viral for her Hydraulic Press Girl videos, im...

Naomi Hobson  grew up on some of the most beautiful country on the continent, Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland, and is named after the hoop pine that grows there. Her southern  Kaantju and Umpila culture has always been a driving force in her art, from bold expressive paintings to ceramics and photography. Her series  Adolescent Wonderland  features teenagers in her small community of C...

Painter  Prudence Flint  has a career spanning 35 years, best known for enigmatic pictures of female protagonists in surreal domestic scenes. Despite a serious local following, her paintings have proved much more popular overseas, and she only produces around eight a year. All situate the viewer in an intriguing psychological space -- but does the painter ever feel too exposed? A Beginner’s guide...

Daniel speaks with the pioneering US photographer, activist and UCLA Professor  Catherine Opie , whose early portraits of her genderqueer community challenged homophobia and moral panic during the heightened atmosphere of the AIDS epidemic. Catherine has gone to become one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographers.  Binding Ties  is the first survey of her work in Australia. My Thi...

When did artists begin doing ‘residencies’? From the patronage system of Renaissance Italy, to artists’ colonies of the 19th Century and the decades-long stint of an artist-in-residence at the NYC Sanitation Department,  researcher  Amaara Raheem  tells us the history and ideas behind the Artist-in-Residence. Producer Lisa Divissi catches up with the artist-in-residence of Melbourne’s Footscray Ra...

Jerry Saltz   is the Pulitzer prize-winning art critic for New York Magazine. Before he turned his hand to writing at the age of 40, he drove long-haul trucks and was a failed visual artist. Jerry reckons the gatekeepers of the art world have effectively 'effed off' and now anyone can —and must— take part. Jerry Saltz's latest book of essays is  Art is Life . First broadcast January 2023. Many gre...

On our final show of the year, we look at the work and career of the great  Emily Kam Kngwarray.  A senior Anmatyerr woman from Utopia who took up painting in her 70s, Kngwarray is arguably the most significant contemporary artist from Australia to emerge in the twentieth century. Daniel speaks with Hetti Perkins, the co-curator of a summer blockbuster showcasing Kngwarray's work on at the Nationa...

In the middle of a rarefied gallery or in a busy city square, a bronze statue of a woman looms in front of you. But this figure isn’t on a plinth or striking a heroic pose: she’s an ordinary modern woman, looking at her phone with a calm detachment. It’s said the monument Reaching Out is only the third public statue in Britain of a Black woman. The artist behind it is  Thomas J Price  - one of the...

Lee Miller  cut a glamorous figure among the Bohemian art circles of Paris. As a fashion model she captured the eye and heart of Man Ray; as a gifted photographer she rivalled his artistic vision, photographing their world with Surrealist wit and a feminist conviction. Lee's career lasted 16 years up until her time as a photojournalist in Nazi occupied Europe, when the horrors of the Holocaust led...

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

Motherhood, childhood wounds and Freudian nightmares preoccupied the great sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who was especially iconic to younger followers in the latter part of her life. One of them was Philip Larratt-Smith, who became her literary archivist. He talks to Daniel about the importance of psychoanalysis on the artist. A new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois is on at the Art Gallery of New Sout...

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. My Thi...

Vasily Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract painting, writing influential theories on spirituality and colour. But for all his correspondence, his inner life can be hidden to art historians, the Guggenheim's Megan Fontanella tells Daniel. And with the discovery of earlier abstract painters like Hilma Af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, does labelling Kandinsky 'the first' still apply? Daniel speaks to...

The town of New Norcia in WA is a monastery in the bush, home to a community of Benedictine monks and a treasure chest of 17th and 16th c. European religious art -- all of which was stolen in a brazen heist in 1986. It's an art crime that RN's Marc Fennell set out to unpack with art historian and fraud expert Dr Pamela James in a new SBS TV series. My Thing is… The Resilience Coat. Rowena and Ange...

Catherine Sarah Young is an artist working with science to talk about the climate crisis. Most recently, she's making art about petrichor -- the smell of recent rain emanating from the earth, and what it might be like when fire and flood obliterate it... or what petrichor smells like on Mars! Catherine is the Art Show's ABC RN Top 5 resident. When James Tylor discovered the laborious but beautiful...

US artist Lonnie Holley is a prolific maker of things - whether it’s his assemblages of found objects or the fluid, jazz-style improvisations of his music. He’s one of those polymath creative spirits who don’t separate one artform from the other. But his life of improvisational creativity wasn’t a certainty for Lonnie, who was born 73 years ago in the Jim Crow era in a hotbed of racial politics in...

We start this week's episode on a lapping city harbour where Quandamooka artist  Megan Cope  has prepared 85,000 oyster shells for her monumental artwork Whispers for the 50th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House —  before that, it's where Gadigal people gathered for thousands of years. Tarek Atoui  is attuned to the sounds of harbours -- from Sydney to Beirut, Porto to Singapore, the Lebanese so...

How important is the 'social license' provided by arts events to fossil fuel companies? How significant is the money provided to art festivals by those companies? A recent study examines the current involvement of coal, gas, and oil corporations in arts sponsorship in Australia. Daniel speaks with the report's co-author Dr Adam Karg, Anna Weekes from a group that spearheaded a campaign to end foss...

How do the much-talked about principles of care ethics apply to visual arts? Whether it be the treatment of others in the commercial art world, the trope of the lone male genius, or the practices of contemporary artists navigating political and environmental crisis. Jacqueline Millner has co-edited the book Care Ethics and Art and joins Daniel in convo with artist Jesse Boylan. Social societies ma...

Newell Harry is one of those people that finds the connections, the invisible networks and chance encounters - that link us all. In his exhibition Esperanto Newell makes use of found objects and sourced materials alongside his own original artworks. The story it weaves is full of cross-cultural connections --from South Africa, where his family fled Apartheid, to Oceania. But also driven by moments...

Hoda Afshar is a photo media artist known for examining people denied a voice, or those risking everything for freedom, or truth. At the same time, Hoda is  is also concerned with the politics of traditional documentary photography, and centres the humanity of her subjects. From her portraits of refugees detained on Manus Island, to immortalising whistleblowers as classical Greek statues and a ser...

Kara Walker  is one of America’s most significant living artists, known for cut-paper silhouettes and gigantic public sculptures, using the visual artefacts of slavery in nightmarish black and white scenes. At the heart is an exploration of race, sexuality and gender, and a critique of white supremacy. Could the black-humoured delivery of the message get lost on Australian audiences? Hopefully not...

There's an enduring appetite for novels about artists and their muses. Australian writers Kylie Needham ( Girl in a Pink Dress ) and Edwina Preston ( Bad Art Mother ) have written books centred on women artists who are navigating ambition, doubt, and freedom in art scenes where men wield the power and where women are routinely cast as muses rather than as creators. Recorded for RN's Big Weekend of...