The Art Show

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.