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Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.

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 curatorial vision for the Tarrawarra Biennial - We Are Eagles. And Julie Fragar on her 2025 Archibald Prize-winning work, Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene), and her relationship with its subject, Brisbane artist Justene Williams.

Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.

Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.

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 Ricky Swallow has been taking LA by storm with his striking bronze sculptures, but is returning home for his first foray into public art. And Sydney-based Pasifika artist Latai Taumoepeau's monumental work is a vital call to action on climate change. 

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 glaciers and glacial rivers of Iceland over two decades. You can see Presence, a major collection of his work, at GOMA in Brisbane.  And Mike Hewson explains how he came to create playgrounds, saunas and barbecues as part of his art practice and how he become comfortable with the public clambering all over his work. Mike's latest exhibition, The Key's Under the Mat, is on at the AGNSW.

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 next generation of artists. But professional rivalry and her status as an ‘unmarried daughter’ would challenge her autonomy and legacy.  Produced and presented by Rosa Ellen and commissioned by the Art Gallery of South Australia. After a season at AGSA, the exhibition of Dangerously Modern is on at the Art Gallery of NSW until February 16, 2026.

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 ultimately sabotaged her own career. It wasn't until she struck out on her own as a single mother, that Stella painted her most compelling work and achieved a fragile success. Produced and presented by Rosa Ellen and commissioned by the Art Gallery of South Australia.

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 had to inhabit a bullet-proof confidence and find a sense of freedom, away from the strictures of a Victorian society. In episode 1, hear how she found freedom in an unlikely Irish rural setting, discovered modernism and, it’s speculated, pursued queer relationships. Produced and presented by Rosa Ellen and commissioned by the Art Gallery of South Australia.

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 manufactured: how things are assembled, engineered, cobbled together, whether objects, identities, or whole worlds. Tim Riley Walsh and artist Keemon Williams join Micheal Do in his final episode as host for the year.

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, forged in clay, carry memory and care. Their work carries grief and humour, kitsch and devotion, and memories of Cabramatta markets, their mother's hands and the textures of Lao family life.

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 that life itself could be spectacle, and spectacle survival. Tate Modern’s recent exhibition Leigh Bowery! brought his world back into focus, and the curator Fiontan Moran talks about Leigh’s legacy: how a Melbourne boy became a myth, and why he continues to matter today.

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 contemporary art. Works that circulate into offices, foyers, and living rooms; into the lives of people who might never have thought of themselves as collectors. Barry Keldoulis, Senior Art Consultant at Artbank, Ray Wilson, an Artbank client, and artist Monica Rani Rudhar, whose work is in the collection share their experiences with The Art Show.

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 everyday They ask how we see and how we're seen.  In Melbourne for her solo exhibition, Skin Tight at ACCA, Self talks art and politics, fabric and representation and takes us into her experience of New York.

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, explores the emotional registers of place: how landscapes can be more than just backdrops, and can instead become part of who we are. Sarah was a recent recipient of an honourable mention at the Bowness Photography Prize for her work, Chamber of Projection 1.