The self-portrait is perhaps the most ubiquitous image of the modern era, but how do contemporary artists use the portrait, not just to reflect themselves or their subject, but to shift our understanding of who we are and who we can be?

Atong Atem takes us into her practice of self-portraiture, exploring how the history of beautification has inspired her images, and why a love for interior design has been an important influence.

And acclaimed contemporary artist Joan Ross explains why fluorescent yellow became central to her work, and how she is reframing the colonial context of the portrait.

Those trees came back to me in my dreams is on at the National Portrait Gallery until February 2025

Public art comes with big price tags and excites popular opinion, but what does it actually take to produce such large work and how does art change our experience of the public sphere?

Justene Williams takes a chainsaw to her art and to the idea that women in public should be passive, with giant feminine statues that are inspired by the sheela na gig carvings of the middle ages

Lindy Lee discusses her major new work, Ouroboros, at the National Gallery of Australia. 

And for most artists, the idea of the audience climbing all over their work would be a nightmare, but for Mike Hewson, it's the whole point. Mike has created playgrounds across Australia that bring an artistic approach to the park and invite children and parents to accept a bit of risk into their lives.

Australian designer Marc Newson has helped to define the shape of our world today. But what are the artworks that inspired his approach and shaped his world?

NGV Curator Laurie Benson takes you into the history of Rodin's The Thinker and explores what happens when a work of art becomes a cultural phenomenon.

Jason Phu shares his latest Phuism.

And chef and restaurateur Kylie Kwong shares the deeply personal story of the artwork that watched over customers at her restaurant Lucky Kwong.

Tim Winton is one of Australia's greatest writers, but this year he found himself at the centre of the art world when Laura Jones' portrait took out the Archibald Prize. From his earliest experiences in a gallery to some of the earliest examples of art in Australia, Winton shares the work that's helped to shape his own keen observations of nature and our own place in it.

Two guards from the Art Gallery of NSW explain what it takes to keep the work safe and introduce us to their own favourite paintings.

And Lucienne Rickard discusses her new durational work, Wreck, and why she's chosen to erase her own art, leaving only ghostly shadows behind.

Adam Weinberg ran the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of New Yorks most iconic art spaces, for over 20 years. And he is a quintessential New Yorker.

More artful poetry from millennial slashie Jason Phu.

A peek into the studio of another real life artist partnership in the Blue Mountains of NSW, Claire Healey and Sean Cordeiro. They will be exhibiting shortly here, and in 2025 at The Tokyo Art Fair

One of the most salacious art scandals to hit the global art market is that of the Wildensteins. Author and journalist Rachel Corbett brings us her New York Times investigation of this secretive and flawed family dynasty that stretches back five generations.

Poet and sculptor Jason Phu with more of his artful silliness.

Plus the idea of artists, romantically partnered with other artists is a powerful narrative. Nabila Nordin and Nick Modrzewski join us from LA.

Curator and art writer Micheal Do is sitting in for Daniel Browning for the next five weeks.

Author Markus Zuzak takes us back to 2005, to a wintery day in Vienna where an artwork by a little known German/Austrian painter Werner Berg found and transported him. Micheal and Markus discuss art, writing and memoir - his latest book is Three Wild Dogs and The Truth.

Angelica Mesiti's arresting and monumental immersive piece The Rites of When startles and entrances Micheal Do at the Tank at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Poet, sculptor and painter Jason Phu presents one of his classic poetic Phu-isms 

And we visit a very tidy studio in Western Melbourne where artist Darren Wardle divulges his obsession: ruination.

Images left to right:

Detail from Werner Berg Vor Der Auferstehung (Before the Resurrection) (1965)

Detail from screenshot of Angelica Mesiti The Rites of When (2024)

Detail from Darren Wardle Slumlord (2016)

Cressida Campbell and Margaret Preston (1875-1963): two beloved printmakers inspired by Ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodcut genre whose influence swept through western art. Rosa speaks to Cressida and Geelong Gallery senior curator Lisa Sullivan about Ukiyo-e and Preston, for a new exhibition connecting all three printmaking styles.

Art History professor Roger Benjamin joins us to talk about the Gina Rinehart portrait drama. 

Khaled Sabsabi moves fluidly between the genres of music and visual art, but his art always has the same goal: to make meaningful work, to make society better. After many years of community development  work and thought-provoking installation artwork made from his studio in Western Sydney, Khaled was honoured with a 2023 Creative Australia award, and a residency at the prestigious American Academy in Rome.

This program first aired Wed 22 May 2024  

Helen Molesworth is a curator and writer who became widely known for her hit podcast Death of an Artist, about the artist Ana Mendieta, whose husband sculptor Carl Andre was charged then acquitted of her murder in the 1980s. Carl Andre died last week, and Helen has a book of collected art writing out: Open Questions: Thirty years of writing about art.

Daniel visits the backyard studio of Olana Janfa.  The Ethiopian-Norwegian artist started painting relatively recently but his distinct voice, drawn from his life as a refugee in Norway and migrant in Australia, is humour-filled, popular and incisive.

Brent Harris' psychologically-driven artworks are often described as haunting and even ‘brooding’. So, if you haven’t ever seen his paintings– would it surprise you to know they’re also colourful and cartoonish? More Betty Boop than Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He takes producer Rosa Ellen through his studio, in preparation for Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch, on at Tarra Warra Museum of Art.

This program first aired Wed 7 Feb 2024

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