The Art Show

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.

Sydney-based artist Nadia Vitlin works with olfaction — our sense of smell — infusing her artwork, whether it be clay or paint, to create bespoke pieces that mimic the transportive power of scent: one of the most evocative, deeply personal and memory-laden senses humans possess. 

She experiments in the fourth dimension, and it all began with leaves from the garden and spices you might find in your kitchen. 

Vitlin's background is in science, a helpful start when you consider that scent is carried in molecules, which bypass our brain's central operating system to work on a different region wired to feel emotions.

Just as historical objects in museum collections embody certain histories — of British imperialism and modernity — they also map loss and disappearance for those in former colonial states.

Pio Abad, whose work is "concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects," has mined the stories embedded in certain cultural material such as kris, ceremonial swords from Mindanao, and a tiara worn by Imelda Marcos, the wife of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. 

The result, To Those Sitting in Darkness, earned the London-based Filipino artist a nod for Britain's most high-profile art prize, but Pio Abad says reviews of the work — and that of other POC nominees — ranged from asinine to borderline racist.s.

They used to lay-buy contemporary art together when they were low-paid gallery workers, forging a business relationship early on.

Now, Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf are one of Australia's most successful art partnerships in terms of the cultural impact of the artists they represent — Tony Albert, Lindy Lee, Polly Borland, ex de Medici, Sam Leach, and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, to name a few. This year, they're celebrating two decades together at the head of Sullivan + Strumpf.

What's even more remarkable is that after 20 years in the commercial gallery business they're still friends.

It was while researching the provenance of a child’s boomerang, found in topsoil near the site of Melbourne Zoo, that Kimberley Moulton found the key to her curatorial vision for We Are Eagles, the latest edition of the TarraWarra Biennial. 

The Yorta Yorta curator worked with artefacts and other historical material at Melbourne Museum for years before moving into contemporary art in her current role at the Tate in London. 

Kim explains how that boomerang unearthed a long-buried and disturbing history and earned its place in the biennial, which includes 20 new commissions from artists such as Lisa Hilli, Shireen Taweel, Iluwanti Ken, Nathan Beard and Warraba Weatherall.