The art world through the eyes of Tim Olsen
Tim Olsen grew up surrounded by art. He looks back on 30 years of his namesake gallery and thinks the next 30 years could be the most important.
Few individuals know the art world on as visceral a level as Tim Olsen. His father was the late, great and perhaps most famous of Australia’s modern painters, John Olsen, and his mother, Valerie Strong, was a brilliant artist and painter in her own right. His sister Louise Olsen co-founded Dinosaur Designs but is now herself a painter. That’s not to mention the rolodex of famous artist friends of his parents, who would walk through their front door and whose lexicon he was absorbing from before he began to walk. That his career as an adult would be immersed in the industry feels predestined, if not, perhaps, the manner in which it came about.
“[I became an art dealer] by default really,” he tells WISH. “My vision for it at the time was simple: stay in business as long as possible. It really was a year-by-year proposition, sometimes month to month.”
The 61-year-old is celebrating 30 years since he opened his first gallery back in Paddington. In his own words, he had left school and gone on to art school, as would have been expected considering his genealogy. But after that, what would happen with that degree and scholarship was open to interpretation, says Olsen.
“I wasn’t particularly sure I’d even end up being an artist,” he says. “It was really a case of having grown up in the art world and knowing so many important figures, in regard to who my parents were. I kind of felt that there was somewhere for me within that.
“I picked up the brush. I was a passionate print maker. I embraced art history, developed my scholarship in art, did a lot of writing, and ultimately I came out with an education degree in visual arts with the idea of becoming a teacher or a lecturer in art.”
It was a lunch with his father’s own art dealer at the time, the great Stuart Purves, that set the younger Olsen on his current path. “He was opening up in Sydney and he said, ‘Would you like to be part of my team in Sydney?’ So my thoughts of becoming a teacher suddenly veered off in another direction, and I had to think that perhaps still being in a gallery environment, I was still a teacher. That I was really teaching adults or collectors, or aspiring artists who visit the gallery.”
That’s also where his father’s assistance in cutting a path to his own career ended. “My father never wrote me a cheque,” Olsen quips. “My father actually wouldn’t let me represent him unless I built up my own stable of artists.”
Three decades later, and several location changes before he settled into the current one on Jersey Road in aspirational Woollahra along with the Annexe on Queen Street, Olsen has proved that he’s not just someone’s son. He admits connections might have helped, but the cutthroat reality of the art world is that they can spot a fake a mile off.
“I’ve always said that there are always bored, wealthy people wanting to get involved in art galleries. And a lot of them, a lot of the time, fail, because you can buy yourself an art gallery but you can’t buy yourself an eye.”
That Olsen eye is as famous as the family name attached to it. His current roster of artists represent a diverse cross-section of talent both famous and infamous, but all with the same poignant insightfulness and energy that has become a signature of the gallery. There’s photographer George Byrne, brother of actress Rose, whose photographic works of the LA landscape flatten into uncanny geometric colours. The painter Sophie Cape, whose electric canvases linger on the fringes between the abstract and the figurative. Photographer Leila Jeffreys, and some wild-card surprises such as the actor Noah Taylor, currently on display in the Annexe.
What does Olsen’s eye predict for the next 30 years? “Unfortunately most of my heroes have died,” he says. “I lost Nicholas Harding, I lost my father. Obviously William Delafield Cook also passed away, and the estate of Fred Williams has almost run dry. So I’m having to really bring through a whole new generation of the next great painters. I was brought up with painters and that’s what I stick by. Of course I’ll dabble in multimedia and collaborative pieces, but ultimately, in a world where painting is becoming less and less respected, I feel I have a duty to painting.”
Digging a little deeper on this topic, the future of the gallery as an experience is something Olsen is confident will remain important. Despite changing methods of engagement with information and social media providing a direct route to artists, there’s something to be said about being able to stand in front of something and feel its presence. “I believe you can’t really see and feel great art without being really in front of it,” he says. “I’m sure there are many people who look at pornography and would rather be involved than not.”
