The Art Show
Episodes
The Art Show
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Hadley's Art Prize winner Sophie Cape gets down and dirty and Filipino artist Pio Abad enlists Imelda Marcos' tiara in an act of restitution
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Most artists like to protect their work from the elements, but Sophie Cape, the winner of the 2025 Hadley's Art Prize, explains how exposing her work...
The Art Show
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
UK inter-disciplinary artist Topher Campbell opens up his Ruckus Heart… a powerful and immersive multi-room exhibition at the Tate Modern earlier t...
The Art Show
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Lisa Reihana's compelling take on colonial history and Ben Law's candid reflections on photographer William Yang
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
She took a wallpaper with an idealised view of history and turned it into something far more moving - in every sense of the word. Meet Lisa Reihana, ...
The Art Show
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Gallerists Sullivan and Strumpf on 20 years of art world prominence and elemental explosions with sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This week we speak to the Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino, whose current MONA exhibition features dripping molten steel and showers of light. J...
CJ Hendry and Ricky Swallow: two of Australia's biggest arts exports on ambition and success, plus Latai Taumoepeau's live art as protest
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Three artists in their prime talk to The Art Show...CJ Hendry specialises in hyper-real paintings, but she’s just as comfortable with the art of t...
Public hands and climate change: Nell, Mike Hewson, and Olafur Eliasson
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nell, who has a major retrospective at Heide Museum, speaks to Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran about ghost motifs, smiling poop, and how collaborative proj...
Dangerously Modern Ep 3: Dorrit Black
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In episode 3 of the series Dangerously Modern, we're following the journey of the magnificent Dorrit Black. Dorrit arrived in London in 1927 and embr...
Dangerously Modern Ep 2: Stella Bowen
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In episode 2 of the series Dangerously Modern we follow the painter Stella Bowen, who left Adelaide for Europe and was part of a storied avant-garde ...
Dangerously Modern Ep 1: Margaret Preston
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 20th century, an unprecedented wave of women artists  left a conservative Australia to pursue modern art in Europe.Margaret Preston is ...
Primavera: Showcasing the next generation
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art hands its galleries to the next generation. Primavera becomes a testing ground: a place where young arti...
Sisters Anney and Mechelle Bounpraseuth are making the ordinary shimmer
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sisters Anney and Mechelle Bounpraseuth grew up in a world that promised paradise later. But they chose otherwise, leaving their religion to begin ma...
Leigh Bowery: how a Melbourne boy became a myth
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Leigh Bowery was not a man you could overlook. Born in Sunshine, Melbourne, he left Suburbia for Soho, London, remaking himself into someone impossib...
How Artbank's subscription model works for collectors and for artists
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What would it mean to eat breakfast with a Brett Whiteley or to pass a Sally Gabori in the corridor? Art, not as something you visit, but something t...
Tschabalala Self merges myth and the everyday
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
To look at the art of Tschabala Self is to feel fabric think. Stitched velvet, printed cotton, painted skin: bodies collaged from memory and from lif...
Sarah Rhodes explores the relationship between people and place
07 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Some landscapes don't just surround us, they get inside us. A windswept farm, a rugged coastline, a cave heavy with shadow: they're places that don't...
Quentin Sprague on the art of looking
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
To write about art is really to write about looking. About how artists meet the world: what they notice; what slips through; what remains.In What Art...
Lisa Reihana brings truth to history
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Two hundred years ago, a French wallpaper pictured the Pacific: the islands and empire in perfect harmony against windless calm seas. But it was deco...
Nusra Latif Qureshi's House of Irredeemable Objects
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nusra Latif Qureshi has built a career extending South Asian painting traditions while pressing on empire, displacement, and desire — revealing how...
Sophie Cape's wild landscapes take out top prize
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Some paintings are sealed off from the world: neat, polished, contained.But Sophie Cape's canvases feel porous, weathered by the elements themselves....
Thomas Demand recreates the world
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout his practice, the German artist Thomas Demand rebuilds the world in paper, meticulously constructing life-sized models of everyday spaces ...
Nicolas Rothwell returns to the Western Desert
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nicolas Rothwell writes at the edges of things. He's twice won the Prime Minister's Literary Award — for both fiction and non-fiction — and his w...
Ben Law on William Yang
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
William Yang's photographs are part memoir, part invitation. Queer lives, Asian faces, vanished places — all lit with the soft glow of attention.Fo...
Garth Greenwell & Mark Armijo McKnight's creative friendship
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2020, Aperture magazine invited Garth Greenwell to write about Mark Armijo McKnight's photographs. The images immediately captivated him, offering...
Being forgotten and being remembered
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Scott Burton made art that touched the body before the mind. But like so many artists and men of his generation, he died of AIDS in 1989.Before he pa...
Making space for a child's perspective
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Children live in a world not quite built for them and, for a long time, galleries were no exception. No touching. No talking. Just stand and receive....
The art of children's books
23 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With just a few lines and strokes, picture books hold whole worlds: joy and sorrow, memory and wonder. They can be stark, fun and beautiful, all at o...
Five Acts of Love
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Five Acts of Love, now on at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, isn't a show about romance.It's about love when it's fierce, when it's fragi...
Darrell Sibosado and Frances Rings light up the stage
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When artists step into the theatre, the stillness of the studio meets the breath of the stage. And audiences, perhaps without even knowing, lean in.I...
Yolŋu Power puts Yirrkala art front and centre
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is not just an art exhibition, but a field of ancestral presence.It's a spa...
Shanysa McConville looks back over 65000 years of art
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Grace Herbert tees off on the unnecessary lines between art and sport
18 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From feminist beginnings to kitsch commercialism, minigolf has a rich history. But what happens when you let artists loose to design their own holes?...
Arcangelo Sassolino embraces the possibility of change
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Arcangelo Sassolino's work captures a suspended instant: just before collapse, just after ignition. At the 2022 Venice Biennale, Sassolino paid homa...
Del Kathryn Barton’s creative world-building project imagines empowered, spirited women
04 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 y...
Drawing with sound underground: Jason Maling’s magnum opus Diagrammatica
28 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jason Maling works in the expanded field where — through the interface of technology, screens and a sound system — the sonic and the visual are c...
Thai-Australian artist Nathan Beard’s ironic take on museum artefacts
21 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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-pres...
Frank by name: Dale Frank on taxidermy and his greatest living artwork
14 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Although he's one of Australia's most established, commercially successful and prolific artists, Dale Frank is a reluctant interview subject.Eccentri...
Olfactory artist Nadia Vitlin infuses her artwork with scent
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sydney-based artist Nadia Vitlin works with olfaction — our sense of smell — infusing her artwork, whether it be clay or paint, to create bespoke...
Pio Abad on his 2024 Turner Prize nominated body of work
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Just as historical objects in museum collections embody certain histories — of British imperialism and modernity — they also map loss and disappe...
One of Australia's most successful art partnerships
23 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
They used to lay-buy contemporary art together when they were low-paid gallery workers, forging a business relationship early on.Now, Ursula Sullivan...
How a child’s boomerang returns in the latest TarraWarra Biennial
09 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 k...
Khaled Sabsabi speaks
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Lebanese-born Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi joins The Art Show exclusively to talk about the profound impact of the decision to unceremoniousl...
Warraba Weatherall’s first institutional solo
25 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall, art that isn't a catalyst for something—that isn't driven by critique of gatekeeping museums, the criminal...
The truth behind Vincent Fantauzzo's verisimilitude
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In art, verisimilitude — representing things as they appear — is something like telling the unvarnished truth and it makes perfect sense that it'...
Robots aside, Robert Andrew draws inspiration from country
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Andrew's artwork features simple robotic machines, with a stylus that impulsively draws or leaves a trace; not so much artificial intelligence...
Nici Cumpston: Indigenous artist turned curator to lead overseas museum
04 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
An art historical approach to the work of Khaled Sabsabi
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When questions were raised in Federal Parliament about two artworks by Khaled Sabsabi from 2006 and 2007, it was enough to convince Creative Australi...
Polymorphous performers, The Huxleys, engender joy and seriousness
18 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Driven by their mission statement to create a queer wonderland, Will and Garett Huxley are true polymorphs. A real-life couple who rival camp predec...
Whatever happened to Ricky Swallow?
11 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After rising to prominence locally in the early 2000s, Ricky Swallow left Australia and built an international art career with his small-scale, often...
Topher Campbell splays his 'rukus' heart
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What began as a living archive of queer Black British experience in the early 2000s has morphed into visual memoir for the interdisciplinary artist T...
Latai Taumoepeau: This is not a drill
28 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 So...
CJ Hendry and who gets to decide 'what is art'
21 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Blurring the line between commercial and high art, self-described Brisbane bogan CJ Hendry is a social media phenomenon. Her seductive, hyperreal dr...
The Art Show
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Laura Jones on the Archibald prize plus Jennifer Higgie on the art of interviewing artists
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 a...
Joyful ceramics plus a Timor Leste artist heads to the Venice Biennale
31 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa’s work is beautiful, playful and highly technical…and he’s having a moment, featuring in several exhibitions during ...
Street art in ascendence; the art of RONE. Plus Judy Watson's life of art
24 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The artist RONE was always attracted to street art's impermanence. He's since moved beyond street art and into large scale installations, involving s...
Archie Moore wins at Venice Biennale + Leonardo Da Vinci + Nikki Lam
17 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 sho...
Sarah Contos looks over the Eye Lash Horizon, APA celebrates Intimate Imaginaries and Monica Rani Rudhar on personal stories writ large
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Great conversations wiIn her complex installations, featuring dozens on objects and materials, Sarah Contos imbues and perceives a sensuality within ...
The virtual and real worlds of Cao Fei + printmaking with Karen Rogers and Sean Richard Smith
03 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
How are a new generation of diasporic Australian artists working with their cultural material?
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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. Fi...
Radical textiles and experimental idiocy
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A time-travelling, multi-regional journey through the histories of ceramics that explores how contemporary artists are politicising this elemental me...
Reframing the portrait
12 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 thems...
Playgrounds and powerful women: the role of art in the public space
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
Marc Newson's art inspirations and the story of Lucky Kwong
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 hi...
Tim Winton explores the Australian landscape and Lucienne Rickard brings audiences to tears
22 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Whitney director emeritus Adam Weinberg and an art partnership in the Blue Mountains
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 York...
Art scandals, art couples and art poets
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 N...
Author Markus Zusak on art; the immersive, mysterious work of Angelica Mesiti; the art of poetry; a ruinous studio visit
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 d...
The influence of Japanese ukiyo-e + Gina Rinehart's picture drama
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cressida Campbell and Margaret Preston (1875-1963): two beloved printmakers inspired by Ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodcut genre whose influence swept th...
Helen Molesworth on death of Carl Andre + Olana Janfa + Brent Harris
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 husban...
Alphonse Mucha: star of the Art Nouveau movement
11 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week it's The Art (Nouveau) Show! Flowers, peacocks and sensuous drapes. Bejewelled women entwined in billowing hair and that classic black out...
Ramesh Nithiyendran's inner sanctum and Jack Wilkie-Jans on If Not Critical
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 signa...
That’s not a medium! Art made from unusual material
28 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Street art in ascendence; the art of RONE and Manda Lane
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The artist RONE was always attracted to street art's impermanence. He's since moved beyond street art and into large scale installations, involving s...
Joyful ceramics, the NATSIAAs and a glimpse of Renaissance Europe
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa’s work is beautiful, playful and highly technical…and he’s having a moment, featuring in several exhibitions this ye...
The "master of time" Hiroshi Sugimoto + the much prized lutruwita landscape
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hiroshi Sugimoto's sublime black and white photographs capture subjects as diverse as polar bears and landscapes, to portraits of Princess Diana – ...
Black Modernism with Huey Copeland + cartoonist Mandy Ord
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Kelly Koumalatsos + abstract painter Lesley Dumbrell + Claudia Nicholson
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Three women and three artists with three very different ways of looking at the world: Kelly Koumalatsos  has a book (Madjem Bambandila) that charts ...
Iris van Herpen: the Dutch fashion designer who sculpts clothing
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 almos...
Machine Drawing and The Sex Life of Stone
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
How do you capture African fashion? And When Solidarity is Not a Metaphor
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 monu...
What happened to Thailand's Ban Chiang relics? Plus Judy Watson's life of art
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 —Tha...
Alphonse Mucha and the popularity of Art Nouveau
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Laura Jones wins the Archibald portrait prize + Jeremy Deller
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 yea...
Remembering trailblazing artist Destiny Deacon
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Blak art and Destiny Deacon + an Abstract friendship
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Kimberley Moulten, an adjunct curator at Britain's Tate gallery, specialising in First Nations art and Kate ten Buuren, a Taungurung curator, w...
The influence of Japanese ukiyo-e + Gina Rinehart's picture drama
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cressida Campbell and Margaret Preston (1875-1963): two beloved printmakers inspired by Ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodcut genre whose influence swept th...
John Akomfrah at the Venice Biennale + mentors in art and life + Zeno Sworder
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel meets the British filmmaker and artist Sir John Akomfrah, who is representing the UK at the Venice Biennale with his work Listening All Nigh...
Prison, pokies and colour: Three artists who turned art into therapy
08 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 Chaine...
Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani + Anna Park flip the script
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Saudi-Palestinian artist Dana Awartani studied at a famously conceptual art school, before learning traditional Islamic crafts and principles, like ...
Archie Moore wins at the Venice Biennale + Leonardo Da Vinci + Nikki Lam
24 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 wor...
Nicholas Mangan makes art from phosphate, coral and bitcoin
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nicholas Mangan is drawn to the stories behind some of our most contentious commodities: phosphate from Nauru, copper from Bougainville and cryptocu...
A graphic designer in the spotlight + Adelaide's art biennial
10 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Visnja Brdar's art motto is “The more nothing, the better”. She is one of this country’s most internationally successful graphic designers, the...
Why Katy Hessel never stops searching for the great women artists
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 lo...
Who reaps the profits from Aboriginal art re-sold overseas?
26 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Jennifer Higgie on the art of interviewing artists
19 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
An artist paints her lush Far North home, plus the secrets of Vermeer
12 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
Reviving a Maori artform in a new political climate + doors to an artist's life
05 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We meet the Maori artist who’s single-handedly reviving the lost cultural tradition of barkcloth making. As a right-wing conservative government wi...