CALLUM EATON: WHAT A SHIT SHOW.
CARL KOSTYÁL is pleased to present ‘What a shit show.’, London-based artist Callum Eaton’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following his debut ‘Look But Don’t Touch’ in 2022.
December 11, 2025 - January 17, 2026
In the years since, Eaton has exhibited internationally—in New York, Berlin and beyond—making this exhibition both a return and a recalibration. The new body of work marks a decisive shift: where Eaton’s earlier paintings explored fixtures of public space—the glowing Coke machine or the gleam of an escalator— ‘What a shit show.’ isolates fragments of daily life and gives them the gravity of artefacts. The ordinary and the catastrophic coexist, each painted with equal, hypnotic attention.
“These works pull the viewer into domestic scenes of daily ruptures and the strange allure to minute disasters. A burnt piece of toast becomes an omen; a flower in a bleach-bottle could be dismissed as trivial, yet its gesture echoes larger collapse. A fire-extinguisher’s gauge sits empty. A crashed car, or an e-bike handlebars held with one hand: these are moments poised on the edge of impact. They carry the euphoria of risk, the thrill before things go wrong. Eaton captures that tension; we feel exhilarated, then unsettled.
Technically, Eaton works with photo-realism at cut-out scale. The scenes are drawn from his own encounters—objects he has held or observed, then translated into painted fragments. This slow, methodical labour—each cut-out panel meticulously primed and layered—transforms the chaos of contemporary life into something fixed, still, and almost devotional. His eye for surface recalls the precision of Flemish realism. Eaton hides his own presence in small revelations: the reflection of his eyes in a mirror, the silver-chained hand steering. There’s a lineage, in that hyper-verisimilitude and quiet insertions that link Eaton to Velázquez or van Eyck—painters who, through mirrored glimpses, reminded us that someone is always looking back.
Yet his subjects are distinctly modern icons—totems of a culture entranced by its own debris. Inspired by his residency at the Christine Mack Foundation in New York earlier this year, Eaton’s America appears not as a landscape but a mood: a cinematic tension between speed and stasis. His use of cut-outs evokes Pop traditions—the shaped canvases of Tom Wesselmann, the billboard-cropping fragmentation of James Rosenquist.”
– Anitra Lourie, Paris, 2025