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 In Pursuit of Venus [infected] premiered in Auckland, then at the New Zealand Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. She took a 19th-century French wallpaper, once exotic decor, and transformed it into a living panorama.Reihana talks about what came after that breakthrough and about her latest pieces, at the Sydney Contemporary and Ngununggula.
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 Nusra Latif Qureshi’s work — an examination of tradition, history, and the everyday — alongside a new commission which draws on Monash University's rare books collection. Qureshi explores how objects can carry something larger than themselves — a trace, a wound, or a memory — and reminds us that beauty and violence often walk side by side.
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 attention and acclaim, including winning this year's Hadley's Art prize, Australia's richest prize for landscape painting.
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, it is the exhibition itself that becomes the artwork.Inspired by a work by Sol LeWitt, Demand has recreated the lines of the canvas in the three dimensional space of the gallery: walls float, suspended from wires, their skins wrapped in the colours of clay, moss, cobalt, and lemon.
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 his wife, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, takes readers deep into the Western Desert, showing how Country makes art, how absence reveals, and how silence can heal.Rothwell reflects on his autodidactic approach to art and on the tension between concealment and revelation in the work from the Western Desert.
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 a version of his life and turned it into light.For Law, it wasn't just admiration. It was kinship. Two queer Asian men from regional Queensland. Two artists drawn to thresholds: of identity, of family, of desire, of home.This week on The Art Show, we explore what it means to feel seen in someone else's work, and the unexpected communion that can follow.
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; both illuminating queer lives with honesty and complexity.What began as an assignment deepened into a deep, loving friendship, one that continues to reshape and expand their inner and outer worlds.
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 Halperin explores how Burton's legacy, once forgotten, is being reclaimed.And Janet Dawson, at 90, is presenting her first major retrospective at AGNSW. Curator Denise Mimmocchi asks us to look again at Dawson's luminous, layered world
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 their own right.Tamsin Cull, head of public engagement at QAGOMA and Lilly Blue, head of learning and creativity research at AGWA, talk about children's creativity, and how galleries are being transformed by it.
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 just to children, but to the child still inside us.Illustrator and writer Tull Suwannakit, Wiradjuri artist, writer and poet, Jazz Money, and artist and painter Jason Phu take us into their worlds.
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, family and faith, reminding us that love isn't always gentle, but it's always alive.
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 and Mirning woman, Frances Rings have made something luminous.In this work, light is used as more than illumination: it's a character in the performance. Darrell and Frances explore how the show brings Country to the stage and how they integrated light into the show without overwhelming the performers.
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 Yolŋu knowledge.It's also the featured Winter exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, an important acknowledgement that Australian art is worthy of standing alongside the impressionist and modernist masterpieces at other state galleries.Yinimala Gumana, Gunybi Ganambarr, and Will Stubbs share their knowledge
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 them as subjects, rather than as equals.Co-curator Shanysa McConville explores the exhibition and the history that lies behind it.
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.
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.
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 Art Show as Daniel Browning says goodbye after 31 years at the ABC.
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 Square.
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. The exoticisation and familiarity of Thai culture has proved to be fertile ground for Beard's artwork — where he gives free rein to his critical approach and his broad, irreverent sense of humour.
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 assistant for company, Frank not only produces enormous bodies of work, but he is realising another artistic vision: a botanical garden filled with dry climate species from all over the world.He does all this while managing acute pain from a debilitating illness, and the wear and tear of an embodied artmaking practice that stretches back four decades.
P
great interviews. Instagram is an interesting platform.