Matt's Gallery

06/06/2026

Annie Whiles sculpture meets you at the door 🌵r🌵k🌵

06/06/2026

Annie Whiles sculpture will meet you at the door 🌵r🌵k🌵

06/06/2026

Anna Barham exhibition ZYX open 12-6 pm today Saturday I will be there for London Gallery weekend not to be missed 🌵r🌵k🌵

05/06/2026

.williams.gamaker Strange Evidence opening tonight as part of

04/06/2026

Opening today: Graham Fagen’s solo exhibition ‘Graham Fagen: The Kilmarnock Edition’ opens at the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, Scotland, marking the 240th anniversary of ‘Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’.

Opening: Thursday 4 June, 5-7pm
Exhibition continues: 5 June - 6 September 2026

Commonly known as the ‘Kilmarnock Edition’, the first ever published edition of poetry by Robert Burns was printed and issued in July 1786 by John Wilson in Kilmarnock. Its unexpected success resulted in Burns altering his plans to emigrate to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation.

Growing up in Irvine, Ayrshire, Fagen was taught that Robert Burns was a champion of political, social and personal freedoms, a voice for the marginalised and the oppressed. This position was challenged, however, upon learning this.

How could Burns, a voice of liberty and equality, have come so close to an active and direct involvement in the exploitation, trade and enslavement of his fellow man?

The exhibition brings together a selection of works from throughout Fagen’s career exploring personal and shared experience and identity, with reference to links between Scotland and Jamaica now and at the time of the poet Robert Burns, a theme recurrent in Fagen’s practise.

Thanks to Glasgow Print Studio, Hospitalfield, Arbroath and the National Galleries of Scotland.



Dick Institute
Elmbank Avenue
Kilmarnock
KA1 3BU

Opening hours:
Tue: 10am-6pm
Wed: 10am-6pm
Thu: 1pm-8pm
Fri: 10am-4pm
Sat: 10am-4pm

Text by the Dick Institute

31/05/2026

We are open with the second instalment of .whiles Doorway Guardians and Anna Barham’s ‘s ZYX.
Open today til 5 then 12-6, Weds-Fri until June 28

29/05/2026

Don’t forget - join us this Sunday from 2-5pm at Matt’s Gallery for Anna Barham’s exhibition ‘XYZ’ opening!

29/05/2026

Don’t forget - join us this Sunday from 2-5pm at Matt’s Gallery for Anna Barham’s exhibition ‘XYZ’ opening!

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

28/05/2026