Christine Abrahams Gallery
Christine Abrahams Gallery, first named Axiom, was a Melbourne gallery showing contemporary Australian art between 1980 and 2008. Foundation. Christine Abrahams (5 March 1939 – 15 September 1994) graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Melbourne University in 1961 majoring in Fine Art. She was a guide at the National Gallery of Victoria for several years, then assisted Patrick McCaughey with research at 'Monash University, and was a gallery director and major supporter of contemporary Australian art in Melbourne from the 1970s, after her marriage to husband Daryl (born 1935), with whom she had three sons Guy, Damian  and Ari. Artist Lenton Parr said of Christine that she valued art "as a gift to the spirit and a source of pleasure and enlightenment," while then director of the National Gallery of Australia, Betty Churcher valued her generosity and enthusiasm, saying she "provided Melbourne with a space and an intellectual climate for some of the most interesting contemporary art from both Australia and overseas." Abrahams was Manager of Powell Street Gallery between 1976 and 1980 (the lessees were Melbourne solicitor Harry Curtis and a Caulfield doctor, David Rosenthal). Axiom. Until 1982, Abrahams was co-director of Axiom Gallery, established  in March 1980 at the address of the future Christine Abrahams Gallery, 27 Gipps Street Richmond, an inner, once-industrial, suburb of Melbourne. In the same precinct an increasing number of other commercial galleries, including the long-running Pinacotheca, Niagara Galleries, Stuart Gerstman, and Church Street Centre for Photography appeared. Of Axiom, critic and artist Robert Rooney remarked; Axiom's opening show consisted of large abstract paintings by Sydney Ball, Fred Cress, John Walker and John Firth-Smith, selling at between $700 to $9500, and was followed by a solo of works by photographer David Moore. By 1982 , when the gallery was renamed, Abrahams in an interview proudly detailed its record in supporting women artists;