29/05/2026
For the second in a monthly series of posts introducing our trustees and asking them to delve into our archive, we meet Gabriel Coxhead:
Please introduce yourself, why are you a trustee at Matt’s?
I’m a critic and writer, and also the director of the artistic Estate of my late mother, Susan Hiller. I’ve been coming to Matt’s Gallery for literally as long as I can remember, and some of the most memorable and formative exhibitions of my life – Richard Wilson’s ‘20:50’, Rose Finn Kelcey’s ‘Bureau de Change’, Susan’s own ‘An Entertainment’– were ones I experienced at the original Martello Street space as a child. I became a trustee because I wanted to help maintain that legacy of ambitious exhibition-making for future generations.
What have you chosen from the archive and why?
I was tempted to revisit some early exhibitions Susan did at Matt’s; and I did come across some nice images of me, aged two, with my parents at the private view for ‘Work in Progress’ (1980). But actually it was my late father, David Coxhead’s, connection to Matt’s that became my starting point, via the essay he wrote for the publication accompanying Amikam Toren’s exhibition, ‘Actualities’, in 1984.
In a strange coincidence, one of the subjects mentioned in David’s essay happened to feature prominently in the news on the very day, some 40 years later, that I visited the archive, namely Israel’s participation in the Eurovision song contest. Also, looking over various layout drafts for the publication (from the era when typesetting was required), Robin Klassnik pointed out how David’s text had been conceived as a kind of acrostic, the initial letters of each paragraph together spelling out C-A-G-E.
From there I was led to a whole range of material…
Link in bio to the full piece.
Images:
1-4 Gabriel Coxhead in the Archive, May ‘26
5 invite card and ‘Actualities’ whitebook
6-7 development of invite card for ‘Bluff and Double Bluff’, 1981
8-9 ‘Actualities’ whitebook
10 Coxhead, aged 2, at the opening of Hiller’s ‘Work in Progress’ 1980, by Robin Klassnik
11-12 ‘Actualities’ installation views by Steve Percival
13 installation view by Klassnik