Every action is a memory, a keepsake. The house itself is all about texture, history, and decoration, not only unlike the white cube in the gallery but the empty trophy houses that often appear in interior magazines. For example, the wonderful Warhol Mau of the Nixon era was bought into a hallway waiting room away from the press while the Oxleys lived and worked in New York. As was the case with the Lichtensteins, one exits from a small return point from the main hall upstairs.
Several works by Marrinon, Jenny Watson, Dale Frank, and others reflect relationships that go back to the beginning of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 40 years ago. Even among these friends, one business in particular seems to work at home.
Set against the wood-paneled walls of Carthona’s jewel in the dining room, Tracey Moffatt’s pet thang It is the kind of business that you absorb at first glance, and then do not do at all. Across six large canvases, the artist and sheep spin in inky black and white, shivering in and out of focus, as if in a fever dream. Polychromatic manages to bring out a gothic room with which some artwork can compete.
Karthuna’s grand exterior offers no hint of the group within. Felix Forrest
Once again, Moffat’s work celebrates a moment. pet thang It came two years after 1989 full of color something more, the series that started what would become the most stellar international career for any Australian artist. Moffat, who was showing at another gallery, brought the business to Oxley’s in 1990, where she was used to coming to chat.
She moved this out of her car and said, “Tracy, what are you doing?” “You show up with someone else, take it away,” Oxley recalls. “So I took it away, and then she came back and said ‘I’m going back to work now,’ so obviously she’s made some arrangements.”
Moffat appears with Roslyn Oxley to this day. “She’s a wonderful person to work with, and strong, good sport speaks her mind,” Oxley says of the artist. “She really is an amazing person.”
However, work that does not fill a catastrophe is as wonderful as work that fills a catastrophe. “I’ve never really gotten anything good [Rosalie] Gascoigne, I didn’t get the best of Bronwyn [Oliver]Oxley says. “I didn’t get the best of a lot of our artists, especially early on, because the gallery costs a lot of money to run. And Tony had the thing I couldn’t pick before the others.”
Small, good Gascoignes appear at odd angles, under stairs and by doors, as Olivers do: a staff-like hook over a window in a smaller sitting room outside the kitchen, or a maquette from Oliver’s Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney in 1999. magnolia. In a sense, the absence of major works is a symptom of Karthuna’s magic.
Her genius lies as much in restraint as in abundance. Not a very non-Victorian mess, a huge respect for what it really was when the Oxleys moved in in the 1970s, becoming the third generation of the same family to occupy the house.
Tony’s grandfather, Philip Bushell, a descendant of the Tea dynasty, bought the house in 1940. The cupboards and large wood and brass tea cabinets that establish many of the rooms are part of the heyday of the tea trade. The formal sitting room, too, largely as it were, has been improved by judicious additions and subtractions.
Bill Henson’s portrait of the Oxleys’ daughter, Ohma, over the fireplace between two rooms. Felix Forrest
And Toni’s mother installed the Mosaic Florence Broadhurst wallpaper covering the walls and ceiling in the 1970s, a major hit for which Oxley is still grateful. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Scream.
What Oxley added is David Noonan’s huge silver plate two moons In the corner. Working together ties the chiaroscuro to the main room in the same way that Moffatt intensifies the darkness of the adjacent dining room. It symbolizes the way Oxley explained rather than renovate, freeing the interiors down to focus on the bones, and the art that sets them apart; Evidence again for that celebrity eye, who was initially trained in interior design at the Sydney National School of Art.
Before the gallery opened in Paddington, Sydney in 1982, Oxley worked on interior designs for the likes of Peddle Thorp. & Walker, Junkin Freeman, and Raymond Lowe in Sydney, Melbourne, and New York.
Not that its owner can tell you exactly what you see, or why or how to move it, other than the fact that her visual sense has been honed and nourished by her dyslexia. “I don’t know why I do things,” she said when asked about her inspiration for hanging six paintings of her pet thang In the most ideal and least likely place.
Pet Thang by Tracey Moffatt is totally at home in the dining room. Felix Forrest
“It was just installed,” she says, although it clearly wasn’t, since there is one panel in the back, next to the bar door and ladle. “I don’t know why I do things. I think life falls into your lap a lot of the time, and then you go ‘Right, you’re in…'”
The next day, I called back. “I don’t know why I said that,” she says. “Of course, I got this from my mother.” Because today’s catastrophe is a story of two dynasties: the Bushel Tea Empire and the Walton Retail, which numbered nearly 100 stores, founded by Roslyn’s father, John Walton, who met Victoria’s first beauty queen, Peggy Gamble, on a ship to America.
“She was really very artistic, consciously looking at things,” Oxley says of her mother, who would go on to design the interiors for all of Walton’s stores and head up the team of visual merchandisers.
A third generation of talent develops at the top of that long driveway, in the apartment above the garage, where the Oxleys’ grandson lives while he studies design. It gives a comfortable sense of continuity at the time of the anniversaries, 80’s to 40’s at the fair and the 180th birthday of Karthuna last year.
The new Fin magazine’s winter issue will be out on May 13th. Jesse Huniford
So, looking back over the four decades of exhibition written across the rooms of her home, who was the famous woman known for seeing the potential in artists even before they necessarily saw themselves as her greatest discovery? I paused for a moment. “Bronwyn, I think,” she said of Oliver, who would become Australia’s most famous sculptor, who committed suicide in 2006.
“It was the ’80s, and she wrote me cold, asking if I’d go see her, and I did. She lived above a little restaurant called the Moving Feast in [the Sydney suburb of] Secret Hills.
It’s a moment captured in a photograph of the Impossible Young Oliver on a shelf in Aladdin’s Cave in a room behind the main stairs, filled with other treasure by Fiona Hall, Juan Davila and Louise Hearman, among others.
In her apartment, Oliver outlined the sizes that would become the early fiberglass sea creatures that appeared at their first show at Roslyn Oxley9. For Oxley, that was enough to applaud.
“What I saw was just wallpaper on the wall, but it was attached in such a way that I had the feeling this girl had a sense of something,” Oxley recalls. I looked at her and thought: ‘Sure, I’ll make you an offer.
The winter issue of Fin magazine comes out on Friday, May 13th Inside Australian Financial Audit.
