[5] Printmaker/painter Helen Ogilvie (1902–1993) was a generous mentor of emerging artists,[6] and in 1949 Stanley Coe appointed her as one of Australia's first women gallery directors to create a commercial exhibition space on the upper floor of his interior design shop at 435 Bourke Street, Melbourne,[7][8] decorated with pale grey-blue walls and hair-cord carpet.

[14] Also exhibited there were Margo Lewers, Ian Fairweather (23 April – 3 May 1956), Leonard French (who showed his Illiad series, amongst his earliest experiments with enamel house paint on Masonite, October 1952),[15] Inge King,[16] Arthur Boyd (15–24 September 1953), Charles Blackman, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (whose first Australian show in a commercial gallery was there in 1953), Helen Maudsley, Sydney Nolan,[17] Clifton Pugh,[18] Michael Shannon, Guy Grey-Smith,[19] David Dalgarno, Ian Armstrong and others.

[20] Charles Blackman unveiled his radical series of schoolgirl paintings at the Peter Bray Gallery in May 1953, establishing his reputation in a decade in which he invented the themes that defined his career.

Abstract sculptor Lenton Parr, returning to the country after working as assistant to Henry Moore, held his first Australian exhibition at the gallery in 1957, the same year that Arthur Boyd showed his figurative ceramic sculptures there.

[22] Ogilvie, Modernist printmaker, painter and craftsperson in her own right, was engaged with the Crafts Revival of the 1950s and 60s, and made a living designing cutting edge lampshades in London for a period.