Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery at Sydney Contemporary

The Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery’s booth of carefully curated works at Sydney Contemporary 2024 is drawn from their archive, which includes key historical moments, over the gallery’s forty-two-year history. A history of discovering and supporting some of the most recognisable Australian artists, alongside international artists, whose work is often unconventional, sometimes confronting, but always thought provoking.

Selected works include a pair of previously unseen images from Bill Henson’s Paris Opera Project, 1990-1991, which was the result of an approach in the late 1980s by the Opéra Garnier and Opéra Comique to collaborate with them. However, Henson was more interested in documenting the audience and did so over a period of several months from different positions in the theatre. He used specific lenses that allowed him to shoot in very low light; and shot the series on film instead of digitally, preferring the grain like quality that is reminiscent of old fashion photographs. He would then go on to restage the photographs in his Melbourne studio, which resulted in a series of “anti-portraits” that have a surreal and distant quality.

Alongside Henson’s photographs are a group of early sculptures by the Melbourne-based artist, Linda Marrinon from 1998. These works were made between a residency at the Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia) Green Street Studio, New York, in 1997, and undertaking a master of fine arts (sculpture) at the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne in 1999. Marrinon first exhibited at the Oxley9 Gallery in 1987, as a painter, before beginning to make terracotta sculptures of landmark buildings, figures, and busts in the 1990s. Marrinon’s approach is whimsical rather than robust, merging her facility with comic strip drawing into sculptural forms, influenced by her formal study of nineteenth century French sculptors such as Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. There is humour and lightness to her works that belies a wryness in sensibility.

Then there are artworks that have never previously been exhibited from the Yolngu painter and printmaker Nyapanyapa Yunupingu’s (1945-2021) estate. An artist whose artwork departed from a more traditional Indigenous approach, avoiding clan stories, design, and expressions relating to Country to an abstract and figurative oeuvre, which she described as mayilimiriw (meaningless). Originally, Yunupingu began as a printmaker but transitioned to painting in 2007, at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka | Yirrkala Art Centre. It was these works that captivated Roslyn Oxley during a visit to Yirrkala at that time. Yunupingu stated in a video made for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2013, “I do beautiful, neat paintings and work . . . I didn’t do trees, rocks or anything else . . . I only made designs.”

Oxley’s instinctual eye has steered her into taking on “risky” artists, whose work is interesting rather than just decorative. She acknowledges that some artists find a market, while others can make fascinating work but don’t necessarily sell.

However, it’s all about a bigger picture, as careers grow and develop at different speeds. The works selected for the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery booth are connected by ideas that reverberate, inspire and provoke, and have the ability to articulate via a multitude of practices.

This article was originally published in issue 68, Artist Profile 

EXHIBITION
Sydney Contemporary
5 – 8 September 2024
Carriageworks, Sydney