dialogue
Gus Monday | Artist
October 2025
5 min read
Gus Monday examines how institutional spaces shape memory, value, and power. His work treats architecture not as a neutral backdrop but as an active agent, exposing what these structures allow, restrict, or obscure. Rather than depicting a space as it is, he reveals what it refuses to show.
Influenced by artists like Frank Bowling, Carlo Crivelli, and William Kentridge, Monday explores how surface, illusion, and abstraction can hold political and historical weight. His paintings become Trojan horses, quietly subversive, critically embedded within the very systems they question.
For Monday, what’s left unsaid is just as vital as what appears on the canvas. Omissions, silences, and absences create space for projection and reflection, inviting viewers to consider not only what is seen, but also what is deliberately withheld.
Gus Monday. Photo by Ané Swart.
Gus, could you share what you aim to communicate through your work?
”Institutional spaces quietly direct memory, worth, and power. My practice investigates these spaces not as empty vessels but as active agents in the construction of social behaviour and historical awareness; how they fit into the canon. With painting and drawing, I attempt to expose the codes within architecture, what they permit, what they prohibit, and what they conceal. I'm more interested in demonstrating a space how it is not, as opposed to how it is.”
Gus Monday, Freemasons Hall I, Oil on linen on panel, 122 x 190 cm, 2025. Photo by Ben Westoby. Artwork exhibited by Carl Kostyal as part of the artist’s solo show Three rooms - Museum, Institution, Gallery, October 2025.
What were your key insights during your MA at the RCA?
“The RCA provided me with room to learn how to paint… More importantly it gave me time to identify the location of my practice and the way in which I approach visualising concepts; establishing the arena that I wanted to explore.”
Gus Monday, Zeitz Mocaa, Iziko Conservation Room II, 190 x 122 cm, Oil on linen on panel, 2025. Artwork exhibited by Carl Kostyal as part of the artist’s solo show Three rooms - Museum, Institution, Gallery, October 2025.
Which artists, both historic and contemporary, inspire you the most, and why?
”Frank Bowling taught me that painting can carry political and historical weight without being overtly didactic, that abstraction, when handled carefully, can be semi-literal. His approach allows me to address institutional disparity and cultural memory through surface and structure rather than image alone. From Carlo Crivelli, I take a fascination with surface, ornament, and chromatic intensity, how illusion and flatness can operate symbolically. His use of decoration as a kind of visual theology resonates with the way I treat institutional architecture as both aesthetic and ideological space.
William Kentridge influences how I position myself, and the work, within systems of power. I see the artwork as a kind of Trojan horse: it enters the institution under one guise, while quietly carrying something more subversive. That duality is essential to how my work operates, critical, but quietly embedded.”
Gus Monday, Freemasons Hall II, 185 x 122 cm, Oil on linen on panel, 2025. Artwork exhibited by Carl Kostyal as part of the artist’s solo show Three rooms - Museum, Institution, Gallery, October 2025.
Recommended
Gus Monday, Thaddaeus Ropac (Pittura Infamante) , 122 x 240 cm, Oil on linen on panel, 2025. Artwork exhibited by Carl Kostyal as part of the artist’s solo show Three rooms - Museum, Institution, Gallery, October 2025.
You’ve described your work as a “curation of passing thoughts, tangible interactions, intrusive thoughts.”
How do you determine what remains in the final image and what is omitted?
”If you view the picture as a foundation for an idea and the concept as a perspective you can play with how it is presented and visually conceptualised, viewing something orthographically, from its zenith, side on, or just realistically. Creating hierarchies of essentialism is a simple way to put it, whilst circumambulating the topic at hand. You are assuming a position… part of that is viewing what is or is not essential to the work. Guston's analysis of the work acting as a ledger is applied in terms of how something is thought up, what remains excluded is often as important and as telling as what is composed. Silences leave space for projection, or reflection, or uncertainty.”
If someone new to your practice could only see two works, which would you choose to show them?
“Iziko Conservation Room / Zeitz MOCAA (2025) and Space Talk (2024).“
Gus Monday. Photo by Ané Swart.
After completing a body of work for a show, does your anxiety typically diminish?
“No.”
