Teresa Grimes

For the first in a monthly series of posts introducing our trustees and asking them to delve into our archive, we meet Teresa Grimes:

Please introduce yourself, and say why you are a trustee at Matt's Gallery:

I ran Tintype, a contemporary art space for ten years. During that time I got to know Robin Klassnik and sometimes had occasion to ask for his advice. He always gave it, it was always sound, and he was always very kind to me.

What have you chosen from the archive and why?

I’ve been a trustee of Matt’s for two years. I wanted to discover more about the early years of Matt’s – how it started, why it started and how it has kept going for 47 years. I’ve been focusing on the Martello Street years of the gallery (1979 – 1991). I have been fortunate to have had almost free rein, opening boxes and looking at photographs, slides, contact sheets, letters, notes, postcards, leaflets, and odd bits of ephemera.

I have chosen to write about Rose Finn Kelcey’s Bureau de Change (1987) because it is a startling, ingenious, beguiling work - both visually astonishing and intellectually astute. It was easy to find transparencies of the finished work, but then very exciting to come across contact sheets of Rose installing the work. As far as I know these images have never been published. After reading my first draft of this piece, Robin sent me a photo of a ‘bag of swag’, a cloth bag full of coins. He’s since found another bag of money (this is the sort of thing that can happen in the Matt’s archive….). Are these leftovers from Bureau de Change? We’re not sure…but these swag bags are going to remain in the archive – perhaps in future years puzzling students who may not even be familiar with money in the form of coins.

In early January 1988, Robin went to his bank in Archway with Kathryn Klassnik by car to pick up bags of loose change worth £1,000. Such a great amount of change – pound coins, ten pence pieces, and lots of copper one pence and two pence coins – came in cloth bags that were extremely heavy.

Artist Rose Finn-Kelcey was waiting at Matt’s Gallery, 10 Martello Street, Hackney, London. She was about to transform money into art. A reverse of the usual pattern of things.

Nine months earlier Vincent van Gogh’s Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers sold for £22.5 million at Christies in London to a Japanese buyer. At the time this was a record amount of money paid for an artwork. Most artists however do not make much money from their work, and Van Gogh famously found it a hard struggle to sell anything. Rose Finn-Kelcey, an artist known for her interventions in public spaces, for her sharp and witty performances, and astonishing installations, was struck by the irony of this transaction.

In response she proceeded to construct what might be termed a transactional transformation; she constructed a ‘copy’ of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting using only coins.

How painstaking it must have been to make, how long it must have taken, how precarious the work, all those coins balanced against each other – but then everything she worked on was meticulously planned and beautifully carried through. The title itself, Bureau de Change, is a stroke of genius.

At the time, Finn-Kelcey had suffered a knee injury and could only work sitting on the floor. She had made other versions of Bureau de Change the year before, so at least she had a template.

She had worked with Robin Klassnik four years before, installing her performance piece Black and Blue at Matt’s. For Robin, the collaborative work and experimentation with an artist before a show is as or more important than the show itself.

For Matt’s Finn-Kelcey made an ‘extended version’ of Bureau de Change. I believe it was Robin’s suggestion to construct a special floor for Sunflowers. The wooden floor, deliberately not taken to the edges of the space, is both a frame making the work stand out, but also a kind of gesture – a sort of faux slice of a West End art gallery. This led to other developments – a viewing platform was constructed so that viewers could look down on the work – a close circuit tv was installed, transmitting the work in real time with the title superimposed upon it, and finally a security guard either sat on a chair, or walked slowly around the work. The guard was a student from the Byam Shaw School of Art and his uniform was borrowed from the Tate, thus bringing a performative element to the work.

Vincent van Gogh’s Vase of Sunflowers, such a familiar image, is transformed with, as Guy Brett writes ‘a strange beauty’ and although a biting satire on the capitalisation of art, it is also a homage to Van Gogh’s febrile creativity. Like a complicated jig-saw puzzle Rose Finn-Kelcey makes the work using small coins; it exists at Matt’s for 20 days and then is de-constructed, the money sorted into its different denominations and returned to the bank. The money goes back into circulation – you could be walking around with a two-pence coin in your pocket that was part of Bureau de Change. Though who uses actual cash these days?! If Rose Finn-Kelcey was still with us she would find that very funny. She enjoyed humour, once commenting “I think it’s important to be mischievous. If there isn’t any humour in the work then I feel something’s wrong.”

Bureau de Change was sold by Matt’s Gallery to Nicholas-Ward Jackson for The Weltkunst Collection alongside Willie Doherty’s The Only Good One is a Dead One (1992-93) and Richard Wilson’s She Came In Through The Bathroom Window (1989). The Wilson piece and Bureau de Change were later donated to the Tate Collection.

When Rose Finn-Kelcey died in 2014, her funeral service was held in St Paul’s Church in Burdett Road, Bow. An impromptu procession left the church and walked to Matt’s Gallery for the wake. St Paul’s is a modern church and ten years earlier Rose had been commissioned to make a large-scale work for the exterior wall. This was a series of shimmering discs with an O:-) in the centre, the text shorthand for Angel.