A time-travelling, multi-regional journey through the histories of ceramics that explores how contemporary artists are politicising this elemental medium. Nell has said that “all my life is a practice", but what does that mean for the work she creates? And how has her latest piece, a quilt featuring work by 400 people, changed her perspective on collaboration? Glenn Barkley looks back at the many histories of ceramics, shares his favourite skewer, and discusses the impact of the “Anglosphere min...
Nov 19, 2024•54 min
The self-portrait is perhaps the most ubiquitous image of the modern era, but how do contemporary artists use the portrait, not just to reflect themselves or their subject, but to shift our understanding of who we are and who we can be? Atong Atem takes us into her practice of self-portraiture, exploring how the history of beautification has inspired her images, and why a love for interior design has been an important influence. And acclaimed contemporary artist Joan Ross explains why fluorescen...
Nov 12, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Public art comes with big price tags and excites popular opinion, but what does it actually take to produce such large work and how does art change our experience of the public sphere? Justene Williams takes a chainsaw to her art and to the idea that women in public should be passive, with giant feminine statues that are inspired by the sheela na gig carvings of the middle ages Lindy Lee discusses her major new work, Ouroboros, at the National Gallery of Australia. And for most artists, the idea...
Nov 05, 2024•54 min
Australian designer Marc Newson has helped to define the shape of our world today. But what are the artworks that inspired his approach and shaped his world? NGV Curator Laurie Benson takes you into the history of Rodin's The Thinker and explores what happens when a work of art becomes a cultural phenomenon. Jason Phu shares his latest Phuism. And chef and restaurateur Kylie Kwong shares the deeply personal story of the artwork that watched over customers at her restaurant Lucky Kwong....
Oct 29, 2024•54 min
Tim Winton is one of Australia's greatest writers, but this year he found himself at the centre of the art world when Laura Jones' portrait took out the Archibald Prize. From his earliest experiences in a gallery to some of the earliest examples of art in Australia, Winton shares the work that's helped to shape his own keen observations of nature and our own place in it. Two guards from the Art Gallery of NSW explain what it takes to keep the work safe and introduce us to their own favourite pai...
Oct 22, 2024•54 min
Adam Weinberg ran the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of New Yorks most iconic art spaces, for over 20 years. And he is a quintessential New Yorker. More artful poetry from millennial slashie Jason Phu. A peek into the studio of another real life artist partnership in the Blue Mountains of NSW, Claire Healey and Sean Cordeiro . They will be exhibiting shortly here , and in 2025 at The Tokyo Art Fair...
Oct 15, 2024•54 min
One of the most salacious art scandals to hit the global art market is that of the Wildensteins. Author and journalist Rachel Corbett brings us her New York Times investigation of this secretive and flawed family dynasty that stretches back five generations. Poet and sculptor Jason Phu with more of his artful silliness. Plus the idea of artists, romantically partnered with other artists is a powerful narrative. Nabila Nordin and Nick Modrzewski join us from LA....
Oct 08, 2024•54 min
Curator and art writer Micheal Do is sitting in for Daniel Browning for the next five weeks. Author Markus Zuzak takes us back to 2005, to a wintery day in Vienna where an artwork by a little known German/Austrian painter Werner Berg found and transported him. Micheal and Markus discuss art, writing and memoir - his latest book is T hree Wild Dogs and The Truth . Angelica Mesiti's arresting and monumental immersive piece The Rites of When startles and entrances Micheal Do at the Tank at the Art ...
Oct 02, 2024•54 min
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 Rinehart portrait drama . Khaled Sabsabi moves fluidly between the genres of music and visual art, but...
Sep 25, 2024•54 min
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 Janfa . The Ethiopian-Norwegian artist started painting relatively recently but his distinct voice, d...
Sep 18, 2024•54 min
This week it's The Art (Nouveau) Show! Flowers, peacocks and sensuous drapes. Bejewelled women entwined in billowing hair and that classic black outline, that turns the dreamy into the bold – the NEW. Despite what we may think about the arts and crafts that came out of Belgium, France and Czechia at the turn of the nineteenth century, Art Nouveau was considered to be an ultra-modern aesthetic. One artist who defined the style is Alphonse Mucha . We hear from Mucha's great-grandson Marcus Mucha a...
Sep 11, 2024•54 min
Over the past decade, Ramesh Nithiyendran has become one of the most visible artists of his generation and one of the most hardworking with his signature emoji-like, wildly coloured and often multiple-limbed sculptures making their presence felt across the globe. Daniel drops in on Ramesh as he prepares to unveil his next big solo exhibition - including his magnum opus, a self-deity in bronze. And the first in an occasional series If Not Critical, we meet art critic (and artist) Jack Wilkie-Jans...
Sep 04, 2024•54 min
Sasha Huber is Swiss-Haitian… but she lives and works in Finland. She’s got a truly interdisciplinary practice - but she does have one particular medium, that’s quite unusual - in fact, it’s hard to imagine how she makes art from this non-art material. Her medium is the humble staple - not your desk type - she packs a semi-automatic staple gun like the ones tradies use. Sasha's work can be seen at Crepusculum along with artist Petri Saarikko at Gallery Project8 in Melbourne until 14 September. F...
Aug 28, 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" is on at AGWA Centenary Galleries in Western Australia Dan visits artist Manda Lane in her Collingwood studio to see her beautiful and complex paper cut practice that came out of her background as a street arti...
Aug 21, 2024•54 min
Ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa’s work is beautiful, playful and highly technical…and he’s having a moment, featuring in several exhibitions this year including the MAKE Award , Generation Clay and re/JOY . His work is a beacon of light and happiness in dark times. We swing by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) in Darwin, where artist Noli Rictor, a Pitjantjatjara man from Tjuntjuntjara in Western Australia, won the overall award for his work on canvas, Kamanti. P...
Aug 14, 2024•54 min
Hiroshi Sugimoto's sublime black and white photographs capture subjects as diverse as polar bears and landscapes, to portraits of Princess Diana – but they're not what they seem. Called 'master of time', Sugimoto is also an architect, designing galleries and art installations around the world. Daniel speaks with him at his big exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. In lutruwita / Tasmania, three young artists share a city studio and depict the local landscape in very different styles...
Aug 07, 2024•54 min
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 Rosa about her latest book Bulk Nuts . In 2003 a group of US artists, evicted from their studios in Pro...
Jul 31, 2024•54 min
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 Nicholson, who was adopted from Colombia as an infant, treats photos taken by other people like an archi...
Jul 24, 2024•54 min
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’s a sense in her designs of female empowerment, even if it accords with socially acceptable feminini...
Jul 17, 2024•54 min
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 Australia. Best known for his digital video, film and photographic output Daniel Crooks explains how he’s en...
Jul 10, 2024•54 min
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 is photographer Suleiman Thomas, whose portraits of the African Australian fashion community reflect...
Jul 03, 2024•54 min
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 four decades Judy Watson has been making layered, ethereal art about profound and difficult subjects: fr...
Jun 26, 2024•54 min
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Jun 19, 2024•54 min
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. Daniel catches up with Archibald Prize winner Laura Jones , who painted author Tim Winton. Painter an...
Jun 12, 2024•54 min
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 studio visit with Alexander Brown, an artist who gave up interior design to focus on sculpture made fro...
Jun 05, 2024•54 min
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 speaks with the Art Show's own Daniel Browning, who knew Destiny, about the artist's influential work a...
May 29, 2024•54 min
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 Rinehart portrait drama . Khaled Sabsabi moves fluidly between the genres of music and visual art, but...
May 22, 2024•54 min
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. The resulting works were commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for a show called My Count...
May 15, 2024•54 min
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 Nghe has seen up close the harm caused by gambling on poker machines, or 'tiger machine' in Chinese langu...
May 08, 2024•54 min
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 studio of ceramic artist Georgia Harvey . Taking influences from Mesopotamian art and our cross-cultur...
May 01, 2024•54 min
