This week it's The Art (Nouveau) Show! Flowers, peacocks and sensuous drapes. Bejewelled women entwined in billowing hair and that classic black outline, that turns the dreamy into the bold – the NEW. Despite what we may think about the arts and crafts that came out of Belgium, France and  Czechia at the turn of the nineteenth century, Art Nouveau was considered to be an ultra-modern aesthetic.

One artist who defined the style is Alphonse Mucha. We hear from Mucha's great-grandson Marcus Mucha and Mucha Foundation curator Tomoko Sato, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau.

In South Australia artists like Maude Vizard-Wholohan were part of a newly empowered generation of female art school graduates who produced Art Nouveau designs while living in the first Australian state where women could vote (and the third in the world). Rebecca Evans is curator of design and decorative arts at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and traces the legacy of these artists.

This first went to air Wed 19 Jun 2024  

Over the past decade, Ramesh Nithiyendran has become one of the most visible artists of his generation and one of the most hardworking with his signature emoji-like, wildly coloured and often multiple-limbed sculptures making their presence felt across the globe. Daniel drops in on Ramesh as he prepares to unveil his next big solo exhibition - including his magnum opus, a self-deity in bronze.

And the first in an occasional series If Not Critical, we meet art critic (and artist) Jack Wilkie-Jans. A trained political scientist, Jack’s critical writing explores the power of his country in the art of far north Queensland.

Sasha Huber is Swiss-Haitian… but she lives and works in Finland. She’s got a truly interdisciplinary practice - but she does have one particular medium, that’s quite unusual - in fact, it’s hard to imagine how she makes art from this non-art material. Her medium is the humble staple - not your desk type - she packs a semi-automatic staple gun like the ones tradies use.

Sasha's work can be seen at Crepusculum along with artist Petri Saarikko at Gallery Project8 in Melbourne until 14 September.

Freya Jobbins is an artist based in regional NSW. Her method of assemblage - the art of making three dimensional pieces from objects that have been discarded  - creates extraordinary and often disturbingly touchable sculptures are made from the flesh coloured parts of toy dolls.

Freya is set to have a solo exhibition at Penny Contemporary in Hobart in the new year.

It's Poetry Month and to celebrate Radio National is bringing you brand new poems commissioned by Red Room Poetry. Poet, playwright and dramaturge Dylan Van Den Berg's poem Red Face Man is his response to to Benjamin Duterrau's 1840 painting, “Mr Robinson's first interview with Timmy” 

The artist RONE was always attracted to street art's impermanence. He's since moved beyond street art and into large scale installations, involving space, sound, music, light and large scale art pieces, that breathe life into the rooms of decaying mansions and inside spaces. RONE's "Time" is on at AGWA Centenary Galleries in Western Australia

Dan visits artist Manda Lane in her Collingwood studio to see her beautiful and complex paper cut practice that came out of her background as a street artist. Manda has gone from making stencils to make two dimensional images to seeing the stencils as the art itself.

Ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa’s work is beautiful, playful and highly technical…and he’s having a moment, featuring in several exhibitions this year including the MAKE Award, Generation Clay and re/JOY. His work is a beacon of light and happiness in dark times.

We swing by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) in Darwin, where artist Noli Rictor, a Pitjantjatjara man from Tjuntjuntjara in Western Australia, won the overall award for his work on canvas, Kamanti.

Plus, the woodcuts, and etchings of the master artist Albrecht Durer connect us with the material Renaissance world in Europe. Daniel speaks with Professor Jenny Spinks from Melbourne University.

Hiroshi Sugimoto's sublime black and white photographs capture subjects as diverse as polar bears and landscapes, to portraits of Princess Diana – but they're not what they seem. Called 'master of time', Sugimoto is also an architect, designing galleries and art installations around the world. Daniel speaks with him at his big exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art.

In lutruwita / Tasmania, three young artists share a city studio and depict the local landscape in very different styles.  All have entered a lucrative landscape painting prize, Hadley's Art Prize – and one has won it. Rosa meets Zoe Grey, Rosie Hastie and Harry Bowe.

Art historian Huey Copeland is hard at work on what he says will be “the first gender-balanced and racially integrated history of Western modernism”. Daniel speaks with Huey about the overlooked stories behind some of the best known paintings in the Western canon.

Australian cartoonist and illustrator Mandy Ord makes the mundane profound, with trademark wit and touching humour. She speaks with Rosa about her latest book Bulk Nuts.

In 2003 a group of US artists, evicted from their studios in Providence, Rhode Island, decided to set up a space in the very shopping mall that had forced them to leave. Secret Mall Apartment is a documentary film about the escapade and the conditions that led them to takeover the space.

Three women and three artists with three very different ways of looking at the world: Kelly Koumalatsos  has a book (Madjem Bambandila) that charts three and half decades of her art practice (including possum skin cloak making) that is always embedded in culture.

At 82, abstract painter Lesley Dumbrell has her first career survey at a major state gallery, Lesley Dumbrell: Thrum.

And Claudia Nicholson, who was adopted from Colombia as an infant, treats photos taken by other people like an archive of recovered memories. Daniel came to know her via an ephemeral and transformative performance work. You can see her latest work in Sydney: If the mountain is burning, let it burn.

She’s an artist whose medium is fashion. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen is an innovator, remaking high fashion to be wearable art - fabric is almost plastic in her hands, moulding and shaping it so that it becomes a sculptural form. The first designer to ever 3D print a dress, her atelier in Amsterdam is more like a problem-solving incubator. She trained with Alexander McQueen, and like him there’s a sense in her designs of female empowerment, even if it accords with socially acceptable femininity.

Australian artist and curator, Irene Barberis was mentored by the great American artist Sol LeWitt and got to work in his studio long after his death. She’s also the driving force behind a project to assess his far-reaching influence in contemporary art across the globe.

What does a historic bark painting from Arnhem Land have to do with manganese, the metal that makes lustrous gold and liquid black ceramic glazes? It’s one of the tangents in American interdisciplinary artist Candice Lin's first solo exhibition in Australia, along with cat-led tours, wolf’s urine and the sea cucumber, the aphrodisiac fished for hundreds of years in the waters of northern Australia.

Best known for his digital video, film and photographic output Daniel Crooks explains how he’s engineered robotic drawing machines to produce some of his latest work, and even 3D-mapped his own body to represent motion - a recurrent theme in his mostly screen-based practice.