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 work of Indigenous artists and places them in conversation with the colonial art that often treated...
Jun 25, 2025•25 min
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.
Jun 18, 2025•25 min
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 at MONA, In the End, The Beginning, materials are pushed to their edge and sometimes beyond....
Jun 11, 2025•25 min
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 project and it's a place that brims with female power and agency. Who else but Del Kathryn Barton joins The...
Jun 04, 2025•25 min
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 ominously as Slot 9 — sandwiched between two rail lines under Melbourne's commuter transit hub, Federation Squ...
May 28, 2025•25 min
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 largely unseen. In Beard's case, Buddha heads made for ritual use, squirrelled away in the British Museum....
May 21, 2025•25 min
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 for a living Australian artist. With a menagerie of exotic taxidermied animals and the odd studio ass...
May 14, 2025•25 min
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 kitchen. Vitlin's background is in science, a helpful start when you consider that scent is carried ...
May 07, 2025•25 min
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 tiara worn by Imelda Marcos, the wife of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The result, To Those Sit...
Apr 30, 2025•25 min
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. This year, they're celebrating two decades together at the head of Sullivan + Strumpf. What's even m...
Apr 23, 2025•25 min
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 role at the Tate in London. Kim explains how that boomerang unearthed a long-buried and disturbing his...
Apr 09, 2025•25 min
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 most successful outing ever in 2024 and leading to a series of open letters from different parts of A...
Apr 01, 2025•25 min
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 into monumental sculptures, anti-monuments, and a tense 8-minute film that explores the violence of the ...
Mar 25, 2025•25 min
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 outer suburbs of Melbourne was wracked by endemic poverty and a distant but physically and emotionally vi...
Mar 18, 2025•25 min
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 figured in the paintings of its previous owner, Arthur Boyd. Robert and Daniel chat about wombats, waterco...
Mar 11, 2025•25 min
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 — becoming the first Indigenous director of one of the world's great collections of Aboriginal art hous...
Mar 04, 2025•25 min
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: compromising artistic freedom and the appearnance of arms-length independence of the arts funding a...
Feb 25, 2025•25 min
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 of The Huxleys' performance at the First Nations concert gala, Blak & Deadly ....
Feb 18, 2025•25 min
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.
Feb 11, 2025•25 min
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, Campbell isn't afraid to take risks. His installation at the Tate Modern, My rukus! Heart (2024) is both...
Feb 04, 2025•25 min
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 sculptural interactive machines that simulate paddle boards to bring the immediacy of the climate cris...
Jan 28, 2025•25 min
Blurring the line between commercial and high art, self-described Brisbane bogan CJ Hendry is a social media phenomenon. Her seductive, hyperreal drawings of luxury and consumer goods, combined with marketing nous and a flair for self-promotion, have earned the New York-based expat a global following and commercial success. While the core of her practice is drawing, CJ also mounts elaborate conceptual exhibitions that tweak her audience's innate sense of childlike wonder, and that's where she sa...
Jan 21, 2025•25 min
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Jan 14, 2025•54 min
Daniel catches up with Archibald Prize winner Laura Jones , who painted author Tim Winton. Painter and sitter share a passion for WA's Ningaloo reef and its survival amid climate crisis. Unusually, Laura's own portrait is also on display – she entered it in the concurrent Sulman Prize, on at the Art Gallery of NSW. 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 and as a writer, reviewer and podcast...
Jan 07, 2025•54 min
Ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa’s work is beautiful, playful and highly technical…and he’s having a moment, featuring in several exhibitions during 2024 including the MAKE Award , Generation Clay and re/JOY . His work is a beacon of light and happiness in dark times. 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,...
Dec 31, 2024•54 min
The artist RONE was always attracted to street art's impermanence. He's since moved beyond street art and into large scale installations, involving space, sound, music, light and large scale art pieces, that breathe life into the rooms of decaying mansions and inside spaces. RONE's "Time" was on at AGWA Centenary Galleries in Western Australia For four decades Judy Watson has been making layered, ethereal art about profound and difficult subjects: frontier violence, dispossession and ecological ...
Dec 24, 2024•54 min
Archie Moore 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 other side of the world. This Codex is the largest collection of Leonardo's drawings and notes, made up of...
Dec 17, 2024•54 min
Great conversations wiIn her complex installations, featuring dozens on objects and materials, Sarah Contos imbues and perceives a sensuality within everyday objects. She explores the mind, the womb, the soul and the belly of her major new exhibition, Eye Lash Horizon . Monica Rani Rudhar explores how art has deepened her connection with her family and explains the deeply personal root of her large-scale jewellery. And Mark Smith and Anthony Fitzpatrick celebrate 50 years of Arts Project Austral...
Dec 10, 2024•54 min
One of the most influential artists in the world, Cao Fei has documented China's rapid urbanisation and digital revolutions for over two decades. In a new exhibition at AGNSW, My City is Yours , she traces the connections between major cities like Beijing and Sydney, and explores how the digital and physical worlds connect. And Karen Rogers and Sean Richard Smith share the collaborative process behind printmaking. How does this act of translation change or expand a work of art, and what is the r...
Dec 03, 2024•54 min
The histories our families share can be in the stories we tell, the food we eat, the objects that are passed down from one generation to the next. Finding our own place in those histories can be difficult, but it can also be exciting and crucial. How are Australian artists from the Asian diaspora creating their own stories? And how are they reckoning with the charged history of museum collections? Leyla Stevens uses her camera as a tool to engage with interconnected webs of song, performance, an...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 10 min
