Jes Fernie

For our fourth monthly post introducing our trustees and asking them to delve into our archive, we meet Jes Fernie, Matt’s Gallery Chair.

Please introduce yourself, why are you a trustee at Matt’s Gallery?

I’m an independent curator and writer with big love for Matt’s Gallery. I was a trustee for four years before becoming Chair last year. The gallery has a very special place in the London art scene:

- Artists are at the heart of everything it does

- Robin, the director, describes it as an artwork

- It has a sensibility that chimes with my own – a DIY feel, a relaxed attitude to rules, a heightened sense of the importance of relationships and stories

I feel very useful as Chair.

What have you chosen from the archive and why?

🌵🌵🌵The cactus! It’s everywhere at Matt’s Gallery: on Robin’s shirt, in a massive pot by the window, on Instagram posts. But I had no idea of its provenance. We (Robin Klassnik, Tim Dixon, the new archivist Sarah Haylett and myself) rifled through the archive to find letters, private view cards, catalogues, contact sheets, photos and notes all relating to Hanna Łuczak’s one-week exhibition ‘Cactus’ at the gallery in November 1985.

Łuczak came from Poland carrying a little cactus with her, along with a huge floor-to-ceiling charcoal drawing of a cactus and 12 framed drawings of cacti. She didn’t shed light on her interest in the plant, but perhaps we can surmise that she took joy in their prickly, malevolent nature, their ability to thrive in hostile environments and their general air of survival and defiance.

The myth goes that the many cacti that have inhabited the Matt’s Gallery office space over the intervening forty years have been spawned by this little Polish cactus.

Łuczak’s exhibition was part of a conversation that Robin established with Polish artists, in particular Jarosław Kozłowski, in the 1970s + 80s. Kozłowski’s gallery, Galeria Akumulatory 2 in Poznań, became a model for Matt’s Gallery.

I like how Łuczak refuses to smile in any of the photos. She seems to imbibe the spikey characteristics of her subject matter.

See the photo of Robin and Łuczak mopping the floor? That’s a very MG photo. The director and artist making sure all is well for the opening. It’s something Robin did for every show, paint and clean the floor: “I painted myself out of the door” he says.

🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵

Director’s Note: I feel that Łuczak’s combination of the invitation card and whitebook with the exhibition did exactly what they were intended to do and came together to constitute a work in their own right. She completely understood how they were meant to work together and what they were meant to do. 5 stars!

Images:

1-4 Jes Fernie in the archive

1 & 3 with ‘Cactus’ invite card, 2 with the whitebook

5 Łuczak at work with Jarosław Kozłowski at Robin’s house in 1985 and 6 at Matt’s Gallery

7 detail of ‘Cactus’

8 a letter to Robin from Łuczak

9 press and listings announcement

10-11 Hannah Łuczak, ‘Cactus’, 1985, installation views at Matt’s Gallery, 10 charcoal drawing directly on the gallery wall, 11 cactus and cushions

12 Robin and Hannah clean the floor

13 part of the installation, the word ‘Cactus’ hand painted on glass, present day in the Matt’s Gallery Archive

14 Tim Dixon and Douglas White move the gallery’s cacti at SPACE studios, Haymerle Road, 2021