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Artists tell us how they create and why they do it. From artists’ studios, exhibitions, and live issues, we take art out of the white cube and into your ears.
339 Episodes
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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-cultural obsession with lions, Georgia tells us about her 'cauldron' of inspiration.Artist Anna Park was first exposed to American culture through Disney. By the time her family migrated from Korea to Utah, USA, she was a keen observer and prodigiously talented drawer. Anna's satirical and masterful charcoal drawings capturing online life, are the focus of Look, Look. Anna Park, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
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 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 thousand pages. After spending so much time with Leonardo's works as curator of the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, Rocca has some theories about the Renaissance polymath.'Unshakable destiny' was how democracy and self-rule was supposed to manifest for the people of Hong Kong, according to the last British Governor. Nikki Lam has been working on a trilogy of art films about that promise, as personal tragedy and the impact of the city's new laws alter her relationship to her homeland. The unshakable destiny is on at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.
Nicholas Mangan is drawn to the stories behind some of our most contentious commodities: phosphate from Nauru, copper from Bougainville and cryptocurrency, which Nick compares to an ancient form of stone money from Yap, a Micronesian island. Nick takes the viewer into these histories through sculptural installations and intriguing films. His survey exhibition World Undone is now on at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.My Thing is… GPS Art. ABC science reporter Belinda Smith makes art on the run, creating increasingly detailed pictures of animals on GPS maps, that she then matches with perfect puns, via her Inst account @animalpunruns. First broadcast May 2023.A teapot made by the South Australian ceramic artist Bruce Nuske is a beautiful thing to behold: ornate, whimsical, exquisitely crafted – and importantly, it can also pour a hot cup of tea… if you’d dare put it to use! Bruce's teapots and vessels are also steeped in a rich knowledge of the history of the arts and crafts movement. Listen to an interview with Bruce's collaborator, the late designer Khai Liew, from a previous episode of The Art Show, at 26 minutes.
Visnja Brdar's art motto is “The more nothing, the better”. She is one of this country’s most internationally successful graphic designers, the child of Croatian migrants who took her solo agency from Melbourne to New York, head-first into the competitive world of international branding -- and she's the subject of the first significant art survey of a female graphic designer in Australia, Visnja Brdar: Design Exalted at MUMA.Inner sanctum is the title of the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Rosa Ellen speaks with three of the artists taking part: Lawrence English, George Cooley, Ruha Fifita and curator Jose Da Silva. The chamber music is ‘All Flesh is Fire’, sung by the Adelaide Chamber Singers, composed by Anne Cawrse, conducted by Christie Anderson, recorded by Jakub Gaudasinski.
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 long been missing. So, what sparked her work correcting the record, and what has changed since she started? Katy is appearing at Sydney Writers Festival and other book events in Australia in May.Ellen Dahl ventured out to a frozen archipelago in the Arctic Ocean to take photos. The striking images won her Australia's National Photography Prize. She speaks to Daniel about her motivations to show climate change in action, and the influence of her Sami heritage. Read about her win here.My Thing is... the ocean. They describe grief as being a wave - it can hit you when your back’s turned. Julia Ciccarone knows that. The Melbourne figurative painter also finds peace in the water, particularly the open sea.
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 for big bucks, particularly Indigenous artists. But it hasn't gone according to plan. ABC national business reporter Emilia Terzon tells Daniel about her year-long investigation into what many says is an unjust state of affairs.For four decades Judy Watson has been making layered, ethereal art about the most profound and difficult subjects in Australian art: truth-telling, violence and ecological destruction. From her beginnings with the famed Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, to her monumental public artworks, Daniel speaks to Judy Watson at her largest survey show at the Queensland Art Gallery.
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, as a writer, reviewer and podcast host. Daniel speaks with London-based Jennifer as her new podcast series for the National Gallery of Australia is released. Listen to Jennifer and Daniel's conversation about women artists and the spirit world.In 2007, a group of 'new media' artists came together in India's largest city to form CAMP, a studio with a rooftop cinema. In early-2000s Mumbai, experimental digital media didn't fit into an existing art scene. CAMP founders Ashok Sukamaran and Shaina Anand tell Daniel how they started and why they remain fiercely non-commercial. Ashok and Shaina are in Australia for PHOTO 24 festival.Larrakia artist Gary Lee has led a powerfully creative life including pioneering work in Indigenous queer sexual health during the AIDS epidemic. The new book Heat covers five decades of his photography, illustration, anthropology and curating. His latest exhibition is on at the Cross Art Projects in Sydney. First Broadcast August 2023.
Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.
We meet the Maori artist who’s single-handedly reviving the lost cultural tradition of barkcloth making. As a right-wing conservative government winds back the prevalence of Maori culture and the teaching of Te Reo Maori, Nikau Hindin is collaborating with artists from across the Great Ocean for the Biennale of Sydney. She explains the complexities and risks in trying to breathe new life into a cultural practice after more than a century.My Art Crush …is Lavinia Fontana. National Gallery of Victoria curator Laurie Benson has long been fascinated by Europe's first professional female artist, 16th C. Baroque master Lavinia Fontana. First broadcast February 2022.Nik Pantazopoulos has been revisiting all the significant doors in his life. The artist started the exercise alongside therapy, digging through his memories to capture the flyscreen door of his childhood home, to the intriguing stall door of a train station toilet and the blue door of a cottage on Mykonos. They all represent thresholds in his life. The body of work, Elevation, is on at the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.
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, is representing Timor Leste at the Venice Biennale.A fountain of drool, the realities of catheter bags and people 'seeing but pretending not to see': Yucky is an exhibition developed by artist Sam Petersen that confronts ideas of 'yuckiness' and other prejudices faced by people living with disabilities, those who are chronically ill or neurodivergent. Producer Anita Barraud speaks with Sam, Danni Zuvela, Makeda Duong, Josh Campton and Lorcan Hopper. A transcript of this story is on the Transcript tab above.
Emeka Ogboh used years of field recordings to create layered soundscapes of his hometown, Lagos in Nigeria. When he moved to Berlin, he added music and combined the sounds of both global cities in critically acclaimed albums. Now Emeka is in nipaluna / Hobart for Mona Foma, where he's making work with the locals – including 2023 Tasmanian of the Year John Kamara.My Thing is... the chickenosaurus. As a teenager, JESWRI took to tagging to 'disrupt' the omnipresent advertising in his inner-city neighbourhood. But unlike many of his mates, JESWRI turned his graffiti into a career that's led to gallery commissions, community murals of Indigenous heroes and –ironically– advertising. The 'chickenosaurus' is his latest art project for Not Natural at the Science Gallery Melbourne.Artist-inventor Jessie French has turned dried algae into a plastic product that perhaps could one day replace one of the more toxic plastic products around. Jessie's Melbourne studio is unlike a lab in that most of her experiments have resulted in beautiful artworks – sheets of colourful, transparent biopolymer.
So, you're given the keys to Australia's largest visual art festival, what next? Romanian-born curator Cosmin Costinas and Colombian Inti Guerrero are the co-directors of the Sydney Biennale. The art power couple tell us how they got to know Australian art and how they selected 116 artists from dozens of countries to showcase a world of contemporary art in this year's Biennale Ten Thousand Suns.My Thing is... the 'olla'. Ceramic artist Richilde Flavell has been inspired by the ancient plant watering jug, the olla, to make artworks about motherhood and the body. Her exhibition Ok! Motherhood is on at Yarilla Arts and Museum in Coffs Harbour.This year marks 100 years of Surrealism! Much more than just Salvador Dalí's melting clocks, Surrealism was a revolutionary set of ideas and aesthetics that formed in the aftermath of the trauma of WWI. Robert Zeller is a contemporary Surrealist painter and author of New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting.
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, drawn from his life as a refugee in Norway and migrant in Australia, is humour-filled, popular and incisive.Brent Harris' psychologically-driven artworks are often described as haunting and even ‘brooding’. So, if you haven’t ever seen his paintings– would it surprise you to know they’re also colourful and cartoonish? More Betty Boop than Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He takes producer Rosa Ellen through his studio, in preparation for Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch, on at Tarra Warra Museum of Art.
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 of Victoria's Triennial.We meet up with Australian artist Daniel Boyd, fresh from his first major solo exhibition in Europe and who’s just shown his work at the New York gallery that represents some high-flying international artists.And hear from Diana Al-Hadid, the Syrian-born US sculptor who's made stunning artworks in response to two 15th C. paintings owned by the National Gallery of Victoria – audience favourite The Garden of Love and a religious painting by Hans Memling.
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, imitating household objects getting crushed by a hydraulic press. Now she's in the art gallery -- featuring in the National Gallery of Victoria's Triennial.In parts of Mexico, a high price is being paid for the world's insatiable appetite for avocados. Artist Fernando Leposse investigates the ecological and social costs of the industry in his art project Conflict Avocadoes.
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 Coen, displaying their humour, creativity and brilliance. First aired March 2023.My Thing is ...the Persian poet Hafez. Artist Ali Tahayori always returns to the lyrical poetry of the master Hafez for inspiration in both life and art. Ali works with sparkling hand-cut mirrors that reference the traditional Iranian craft of Āine-Kāri. Through light and mirror, he explores transcendent moments and what it means to be queer and diasporic. First aired February 2023.The 2023 Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was the largest ever assembled of the artist's works. Gregor Weber is a curator and Vermeer biographer and tells producer Rosa Ellen about where Vermeer might have got hold of a camera obscura to achieve his brilliant illusion of perspective. First aired May 2023.
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 to art openings. The art exhibition opening is a rite of passage for artists and art lovers alike, but it can be an intimidating and exclusive social affair. Artists Ming Liew and Thitibodee Rungteerawattananon made a pact to break into the Melbourne art scene by attending as many art openings as they could together, culminating in an art film about the project, by Ming. Rosa tags along to one gallery to see how it’s done. Charles Lai runs a public calendar of the city's visual arts events. First aired July 2023.Humpty Doo is a red-dirt, mango-growing, beer-swilling town on the border of greater Darwin and the bush. Photographer Liss Fenwick grew up there and has captured its unique character in a powerful photo series called Humpty Doom, photographed over 10 years. First aired May 2023.
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 Thing is… improvising music to art. Musician Rosie Westbrook is hired by galleries and sometimes artists themselves, to walk around and improvise instrumental music in response to the artworks. Her latest album is Always the Sea.Episode first aired April 2023.
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 Railway Station, David Wells. And artists Nicole Barakat, Nikki Lam and Gegee Ayurzana share messages from their studios-away-from-home.In the 19th Century Rosa Bonheur was one of the most popular artists in Europe, inspiring public statues, royal visits and even dolls sold in her likeness. Rosa painted animal portraits, but was equally known for her unconventional life, from wearing pants and keeping a lion, to living with her female companion. Author Catherine Hewitt explains why she was so celebrated, and how she slid from view. Her book is Art is a Tyrant.
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 great artists have claimed to communicate with the spirit world, especially in the heyday of Theosophy and Spiritualism — so why is it shied away from in art history? And why did it attract so many women, like the early Abstract artist Hilma Af Klint and the Victorian medium Georgiana Houghton? Now Jennifer Higgie has written The Other Side: A journey into women, art and the spirit world. Featuring the art practices and radical lives of artists like Pamela Colman Smith, who illustrated the tarot deck, to Modernist artists Suzanne Duchamp and Agnes Pelton. First broadcast February 2023.
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great interviews. Instagram is an interesting platform.