244 episodes

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.

The Art Show ABC listen

    • Arts
    • 5.0 • 3 Ratings

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.

    Lee Miller's glamorous Surrealism and dark wartime photography

    Lee Miller's glamorous Surrealism and dark wartime photography

    Lee Miller cut a glamorous figure among the Bohemian art circles of Paris. As a fashion model she captured the eye and heart of Man Ray; as a gifted photographer she rivalled his artistic vision, photographing their world with Surrealist wit and a feminist conviction. Lee's career lasted 16 years up until her time as a photojournalist in Nazi occupied Europe, when the horrors of the Holocaust led her to quit photography. Antony Penrose is Lee Miller’s only child and in charge of her archive which, incredibly, he only discovered after her death. Surrealist Lee Miller is on at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria.

    Daniel takes a tour of an exhibition designed to evoke the sounds and feel of a Fijian family home -- only fragmented, the same way that memory works. Artist Salote Tawale has partially recreated a real-life fishing raft and house in an installation that mixes paintings, sculpture, and video karaoke at Carriageworks in Sydney.

    • 54 min
    Meet world-building printmaker Brian Robinson + the art critic who wrote an encyclopedia

    Meet world-building printmaker Brian Robinson + the art critic who wrote an encyclopedia

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

    • 54 min
    How psychoanalysis influenced the art of Louise Bourgeois

    How psychoanalysis influenced the art of Louise Bourgeois

    Motherhood, childhood wounds and Freudian nightmares preoccupied the great sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who was especially iconic to younger followers in the latter part of her life. One of them was Philip Larratt-Smith, who became her literary archivist. He talks to Daniel about the importance of psychoanalysis on the artist. A new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois is on at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 

    My thing is... the 'souvenirs' of consumerism. Artist Joyce Lubotzky takes plastic things from the rubbish and puts them in the art gallery. It's part of a tradition of artists asking viewers to reconsider consumer waste as something permanent, not transitory. (Like a bit of trash talk? Listen to our special episode on art made from rubbish.)

    The National Gallery of Victoria recently purchased 27 boomerangs from the 24-year-old artist Keemon Williams, an emerging talent whose bold, empowered, queer portraits exemplify black joy. 

    • 54 min
    Why are hundreds of ancient Thai relics locked in legal limbo?

    Why are hundreds of ancient Thai relics locked in legal limbo?

    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 —That’s possibly because the objects that tell the story of this fascinating archaeological site are in limbo, caught between voracious collectors, tomb-raiding locals and undercover federal agents. Art historian Dr Melody Rod-ari tells Daniel the story.

    My Thing is... Black Histories. Prince made 'Purple Rain' famous, but five years later in 1989, a group of Cape Town anti-apartheid protesters claimed it for themselves when police fired water cannons at them, dyed purple. The Purple Rain Protest is one event in southern African resistance that's inspired artist Roberta Joy Rich in her latest work, The Purple Shall Govern.

    Meet the designers behind DNJ Paper, a textile research project and clothing label making garments out of paper! Rosa meets Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran and Jake Nakashima-Edwards, who want to address the social, aesthetic and environmental dilemmas of fashion and textiles.

    • 54 min
    Kandinsky: the visionary artist 'brought back down to earth'

    Kandinsky: the visionary artist 'brought back down to earth'

    Vasily Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract painting, writing influential theories on spirituality and colour. But for all his correspondence, his inner life can be hidden to art historians, the Guggenheim's Megan Fontanella tells Daniel. And with the discovery of earlier abstract painters like Hilma Af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, does labelling Kandinsky 'the first' still apply? Daniel speaks to Megan on the new eve of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.

    Inside the Victorian Spiritualist Union in north Melbourne, sits the largest collection of artworks by Georgiana Houghton. Her ecstatic, abstract paintings of spirit messages and visions from the 1860s are truly remarkable. Daniel speaks with Rev Lorraine Lee Tet and Jeff Stewart about the collection and their own beliefs about her art.  

    • 54 min
    An outback monastery hides the biggest art heist you've never heard of

    An outback monastery hides the biggest art heist you've never heard of

    The town of New Norcia in WA is a monastery in the bush, home to a community of Benedictine monks and a treasure chest of 17th and 16th c. European religious art -- all of which was stolen in a brazen heist in 1986. It's an art crime that RN's Marc Fennell set out to unpack with art historian and fraud expert Dr Pamela James in a new SBS TV series.

    My Thing is… The Resilience Coat. Rowena and Angela Foong, from the label High Tea with Mrs Woo, have designed a coat for all bodies, all trends and all of life's upheavals, complete with an in-built repair kit. It's been shortlisted for a national craft award.

    The mining town of Broken Hill might still be best known for Pro Hart and his 'Brush men of the bush' but Barkindji artists David Doyle and Krystle Evans are part of a thriving contemporary art scene influenced by Barkindji stories and art practices. Producer Rosa Ellen visits their respective studios after the Referendum for Indigenous recognition an Indigenous voice to Parliament, where the Parkes electorate recorded the highest 'No' vote in NSW.

    • 54 min

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