GUS MONDAY: THREE ROOMS - MUSEUM, INSTITUTION, GALLERY

CARL KOSTYÁL is delighted to present ’Three Rooms – Museum, Institution, Gallery’, a presentation of seven new paintings by the British-South African artist Gus Monday (b. 2000), marking the artist’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and in London.

October 14 – November 15, 2025

“In ‘Three Rooms – Museum, Institution, Gallery’, Monday performs a literal and critical dissection of three distinct, if mutually referential, spatial archetypes: the museum, the institution, and the gallery. Installed across the three rooms of Carl Kostyál, London, this presentation stages a self-reflective critique in which the exhibition space itself mirrors the very typologies under examination.

The first room examines how geopolitical and economic conditions shape whether museums can function as institutions of preservation and care. Across two single-panel works and one diptych, Monday contrasts the immaculate facilities of European collections with the under-resourced conservation spaces of South Africa. Central here is the Iziko South African Museum — the country’s first museum — where the ceiling of its conservation room collapsed, leaving objects damaged and unprotected. Among them was a diorama, once used to depict the Khoi-San people, which had already been removed from public view due to its reductive and colonial framing.

The collapse becomes emblematic not of the fragility of the objects themselves, but of the systemic neglect that determines which histories are maintained and which are left to disintegrate. The recurring draped figure signals this absence, marking the uneven distribution of care and the institutions that fail to provide it.”