PODCAST · arts
The Art Show
by ABC
Visual artists tell you why and how they create! From studio visits, intimate interviews, and live issues, we take art out of the gallery and into your ears.
Episodes
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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
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 to dirt, rainfall, and her own body is an essential part of the process. Filipino artist Pio Abad talks post-colonial loss, disappearance and...
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Topher Campbell bares his body and soul at the Tate Modern and curator Kim Moulton on an unearthed boomerang as inspiration for a major exhibition
UK interdisciplinary artist Topher Campbell opens up his Ruckus Heart…a powerful and immersive multi-room exhibition at the Tate Modern earlier this year. Curator Kimberley Moulton shares how a child’s boomerang led her to discover what was essentially a human zoo, ultimately informing her...
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Lisa Reihana's compelling take on colonial history and Ben Law's candid reflections on photographer William Yang
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, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most acclaimed artists. Ben Law - writer, broadcaster and man about town, opens up about the artist that’s changed his...
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Gallerists Sullivan and Strumpf on 20 years of art world prominence and elemental explosions with sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino
This week we speak to the Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino, whose current MONA exhibition features dripping molten steel and showers of light. Joanne Sullivan and Ursula Strumpf - co-founders of one of Australia’s most successful commercial galleries - reflect on 20 years of working together....
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CJ Hendry and Ricky Swallow: two of Australia's biggest arts exports on ambition and success, plus Latai Taumoepeau's live art as protest
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 the spectacle as she is creating the art itself - her recent showcase exhibition in NY got shut down because it drew too many people. Fellow expat…
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Public hands and climate change: Nell, Mike Hewson, and Olafur Eliasson
Nell, who has a major retrospective at Heide Museum, speaks to Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran about ghost motifs, smiling poop, and how collaborative projects have changed her perspective on art. The Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson speaks to Rosa Ellen about a project he undertook to document the...
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Dangerously Modern Ep 3: Dorrit Black
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 embraced modernism in the new medium of lino cut printmaking. She went on to start her own Modern Art Centre in Sydney in the 1930s and inspired the…
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Dangerously Modern Ep 2: Stella Bowen
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 art scene in Paris in the 1920s. Overseas, a young Stella met the writer Ford Maddox Ford, a relationship that sparked her intellectually but...
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Dangerously Modern Ep 1: Margaret Preston
In the early 20th century, an unprecedented wave of women artists left a conservative Australia to pursue modern art in Europe. Margaret Preston is a household name in Australian art, best known for her bold paintings and woodcuts of native wildflowers. But to achieve this level of visibility she...
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Primavera: Showcasing the next generation
Every spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art hands its galleries to the next generation. Primavera becomes a testing ground: a place where young artists bend, stretch, and spark new ways of seeing. This year’s edition, curated by Tim Riley Walsh, circles around ideas of the made and the...
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Sisters Anney and Mechelle Bounpraseuth are making the ordinary shimmer
Sisters Anney and Mechelle Bounpraseuth grew up in a world that promised paradise later. But they chose otherwise, leaving their religion to begin making paradise now! For Anney, cloth and sequins became radiant scenes of joy and survival. And for Mechelle, cans of lychees and jars of Tiger Balm,...
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Leigh Bowery: how a Melbourne boy became a myth
Leigh Bowery was not a man you could overlook. Born in Sunshine, Melbourne, he left Suburbia for Soho, London, remaking himself into someone impossible to contain. At the club Taboo, he was ringmaster of chaos. For artist Lucian Freud, muse. For the queer underground, Leigh was revelation: proof...
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How Artbank's subscription model works for collectors and for artists
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 that visits you? That's the idea behind Artbank, a federal experiment that began in 1980 and now holds more than 11,000 works of Australian...
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Tschabalala Self merges myth and the everyday
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 life, all the way from Harlem to the Hudson. The characters that Tschabalala Self paints aren't just portraits, they fold together myth and the…
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Sarah Rhodes explores the relationship between people and place
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 fade, but lodge in the memory. The work of photographer and video artist Sarah Rhodes, who was part of the ABC's Top 5 Arts program in 2025…
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Quentin Sprague on the art of looking
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 Artists See, Quentin Sprague turns to twelve Australian artists, but Sprague doesn't just list their works, he lingers with how they see: what pulls…
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Lisa Reihana brings truth to history
Two hundred years ago, a French wallpaper pictured the Pacific: the islands and empire in perfect harmony against windless calm seas. But it was decoration. Pure fantasy. Until artist Lisa Reihana made history flicker — adding ceremony, desire, misunderstanding, and violence. Her vast video work…
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Nusra Latif Qureshi's House of Irredeemable Objects
Nusra Latif Qureshi has built a career extending South Asian painting traditions while pressing on empire, displacement, and desire — revealing how power cloaks itself in colour, and how history leaves its mark on objects. The House of Irredeemable Objects at MUMA brings together thirty years of...
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Sophie Cape's wild landscapes take out top prize
Some paintings are sealed off from the world: neat, polished, contained. But Sophie Cape's canvases feel porous, weathered by the elements themselves. Not so much painted, as unearthed. Once an elite athlete, Sophie turned to art after devastating injuries. It's a path that has brought her...
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Thomas Demand recreates the world
Throughout his practice, the German artist Thomas Demand rebuilds the world in paper, meticulously constructing life-sized models of everyday spaces or scenes. Te scene is photographed, and the models destroyed. Demand is in Australia as the curator of the 38th Kaldor Public Art Project and here,...
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Nicolas Rothwell returns to the Western Desert
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 work slides between both registers: fiction brushes against fact, philosophy slips into story. His latest novel, Yilkari: A Desert Suite, written with…
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Ben Law on William Yang
William Yang's photographs are part memoir, part invitation. Queer lives, Asian faces, vanished places — all lit with the soft glow of attention. For writer and broadcaster Benjamin Law discovering Yang's work felt uncanny. Like recognition. Like fate. The sense that someone, somewhere, had lived…
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Garth Greenwell & Mark Armijo McKnight's creative friendship
In 2020, Aperture magazine invited Garth Greenwell to write about Mark Armijo McKnight's photographs. The images immediately captivated him, offering new possibilities for thinking and feeling. Their work meets in shared spaces: the erotic, the poetic, desire and restraint, silence and shadow…
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Being forgotten and being remembered
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 passed, he willed everything to the Museum of Modern Art — his work, his archive, his name — what followed was a slow erasure. Now, journalist Julia...
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Making space for a child's perspective
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. But, something is changing. Across Australia, galleries are beginning to meet children where they are — not just as visitors, but as artists in…
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The art of children's books
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 once. This week on The Art Show, we're celebrating the picture book as a subtle, serious art form — where image meets poetry and artists speak, not...
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Five Acts of Love
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 fragile; when it lives inside grief, memory, resistance, and revolution. The practices of Megan Cope and Ali Tayhori stretch across Country, history,...
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Darrell Sibosado and Frances Rings light up the stage
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. Illume is one of those collaborations, where Goolarrgon Bard visual artist Darrell Sibosado and Bangarra Dance Theatre's Artistic Director, Wirangu...
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Yolŋu Power puts Yirrkala art front and centre
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 space of authority and deep listening that shows what art can be when it is inseparable from land, from water, from Law, and from the unbroken chain of...
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Shanysa McConville looks back over 65000 years of art
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...
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Grace Herbert tees off on the unnecessary lines between art and sport
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…
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Arcangelo Sassolino embraces the possibility of change
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...
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Del Kathryn Barton’s creative world-building project imagines empowered, spirited women
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...
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Drawing with sound underground: Jason Maling’s magnum opus Diagrammatica
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...
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Thai-Australian artist Nathan Beard’s ironic take on museum artefacts
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...
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Frank by name: Dale Frank on taxidermy and his greatest living artwork
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…
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Olfactory artist Nadia Vitlin infuses her artwork with scent
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…
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Pio Abad on his 2024 Turner Prize nominated body of work
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...
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One of Australia's most successful art partnerships
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...
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How a child’s boomerang returns in the latest TarraWarra Biennial
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...
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Khaled Sabsabi speaks
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...
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Warraba Weatherall’s first institutional solo
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…
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The truth behind Vincent Fantauzzo's verisimilitude
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...
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Robots aside, Robert Andrew draws inspiration from country
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...
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Nici Cumpston: Indigenous artist turned curator to lead overseas museum
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…
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An art historical approach to the work of Khaled Sabsabi
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…
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Polymorphous performers, The Huxleys, engender joy and seriousness
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...
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Whatever happened to Ricky Swallow?
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...
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Topher Campbell splays his 'rukus' heart
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…
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Latai Taumoepeau: This is not a drill
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...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Art Show have?
The Art Show currently has 244 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Art Show about?
Visual artists tell you why and how they create! From studio visits, intimate interviews, and live issues, we take art out of the gallery and into your ears.
How often does The Art Show release new episodes?
The Art Show publishes regularly with 244 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Art Show?
You can listen to The Art Show on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Art Show?
The Art Show is created and hosted by ABC.
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