Roslyn Oxley - Harper's BAZAAR (Copy) (Copy)

Australia’s godmother of contemporary art, Roslyn Oxley, is as passionate as ever about her artists and her collectors

Roslyn Oxley opened her Sydney art gallery, Roslyn Oxley9, before Australia even had a national one. In October 1982, some eight decades after Federation, when it was determined that whichever city became our capital wouldn’t be complete until it had a gallery, the Queen finally opened the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Oxley beat her to it by opening hers six months earlier.

A New York Times article about the NGA opening reads: “Contrary to what is sometimes supposed, there is a lot of good art in Australia.” Oxley already knew this. “Australia is, in fact, one of the more agreeable countries in which to be an artist,” the journalist later conceded. Oxley knew this, too. In the 40 years since her gallery opened, Oxley has fostered the careers of some of the country’s most successful artists. Think Tracey Moffatt, Bill Henson, Jenny Watson, Imants Tillers, Daniel Boyd and two-time Archibald Prize winner Del Kathryn Barton, among many others.

Of course, to compare the NGA with Roslyn Oxley9 is to compare apples and oranges. The former is focused on acquiring pieces by the Old Masters, pieces that establish the entire history of Western art in 20 artworks or less, pieces from across the Asia Pacific and Africa, and modern art in myriad mediums. In short: there’s a lot going on. Oxley, on the other hand, established her gallery as a place for showcasing fresh and provocative art by new and emerging talent, with no more than five artists on display at a time.

Holding space for young artists and new mediums such as performance, installation and video was, at the time, a New York model of artist representation. Oxley had seen it while she was living and working in the States with her husband, Tony Oxley, and their two children, Leyla and Ohma, in the early ’70s. She noted the city’s galleries were moving downtown into larger spaces and representing younger talent — something that was yet to be done in Australia.

Oxley wasn’t always headed for a career in visual art. The daughter of the Australian retail giant John Walton, who founded the Waltons department store chain, and his interior designer wife, Peggy Gamble, Oxley grew up on Sydney’s North Shore admiring her mother’s creativity. “She was so talented; she was a major influence [on me],” she says. Oxley studied art at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School), where she experimented but never took it too seriously: “I tried my hand at sculpture, as you do,” she says with a shrug. Instead, she followed in her mother’s footsteps and pursued interior design, working with architects in Sydney and Melbourne and surrounding herself with artists and collaborating with them on her commissions. “I was always meeting artists and haunting the galleries,” she recalls.

In 1968, she met Tony Oxley (of the Bushells Tea family), at a party they’d both crashed. “Isn’t that lucky?” she told Australian Art Collector in a 1998 profile. “I saw him across the room and thought to myself, Oh, that looks like an interesting man! and I went up and introduced myself.” They travelled the world and wed in a small ceremony, “just us and the witness”, two years later in New York, where they were living. In 1980, the family returned to Australia from a year-long trip around the globe just as the Sydney art scene was starting to kick off. “Someone suggested that I open an art gallery — I suppose I gave out that type of vibe,” she says. “And I thought, Yeah, what a good idea!” With Tony as the business brains behind the gallery (“He keeps us on the straight and narrow … he tells me when I’m going off the rails,” she says with a laugh), she consulted local art experts and pored over the slides of each submission to that year’s Biennale of Sydney. “When we started, I was very keen to show artists that hadn’t been shown in New South Wales and weren’t attached to any gallery,” she says.

Landing on Gareth Sansom as their first exhibiting artist artist, the Oxleys rented an old warehouse in Paddington, and on March 1, 1982, Roslyn Oxley9 officially opened. (An aside: the 9 is there for good luck. “A numerologist told me to put it in,” Oxley once said.) The gallery quickly became the vibrant epicentre of Sydney’s post-modern art scene, with an opening night at “RosOx” drawing students, writers and academics like moths to a flame, as is still the case.

The gallery has not been exempted from controversy — as you would not expect it to be, given its pre-eminent focus on contemporary art. But the key to Oxley’s success is her staunch support for her artists. In 2008, police raided the gallery and took more than 20 Bill Henson artworks following accusations of child pornography. After much public debate, charges were never laid and the works were rated PG. Today, Oxley praises Henson as a “hero”.

When pressed to name new artists she’s excited about, Oxley is like a parent trying to choose their favourite child: she can’t do it. “That’s unfair,” she says, laughing. “I could talk about all of them; I’m passionate about all of them. The longer you know them, the more involved you get.” This kind of personal relationship between Oxley and her artists also extends to her collectors. She always puts them first, often to the detriment of her personal art collection. “I didn’t get the best of a lot of our artists, particularly early on, because the gallery cost so much money to run,” she told the Australian Financial Review recently. “And Tony had the [rule] that I couldn’t choose before other people.”

While the pandemic shuttered many galleries, it brought Oxley, her artists and her collectors closer together. “We could concentrate on giving people our full attention,” she says, “taking works to their homes, and we had much more time to spend with people.” Perhaps more than the art on display, it’s that sense of community and care that keeps people coming back to RosOx after all these years.

This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Edward Mulvihill; styled by Miguel Urbina Tan