Carl Kostyál, UK/SE

Carl Kostyál opened his eponymous gallery at no. 12a Savile Row, London W1 in 2010 with the first solo exhibition of British artist Helen Marten. The gallery has gone on to give many international artists their first platform in the UK or Sweden, among them Imre Bak, Gina Beavers, Petra Cortright, Sarah Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Mandy El-Sayegh, Jane Euler, Claire Fontaine, Tibor Gayor, Mustafa Hulusi, Alex Israel, Sergej Jensen, Basil Kincaid, Klara Lidén, Hanna Lidén, Dóra Maurer, Adam McEwen, Oscar Murillo, David Ostrowski, Timur Si Qin, Cynthia Talmadge, Amalia Ulman, Fredrik Vaerslev, Emma Webster, Brittney Leeanne Williams and Jonas Wood.

In May 2021, after six years of staging ‘rogue’ exhibitions and hosting artist studios in spaces due for development in Stockholm and Malmö, Kostyál joined forces with the Gullringsbo Konstsamling, whose collection he had built over a fifteen-year period, to open the gallery’s new exhibition space, Hospitalet, in the 18th century former mental asylum known as Danvikens Hospital in Nacka, Stockholm, alongside a display of the Gullringsbo collection.

Katharine Kostyál, Carl’s wife, former business partner of Jay Jopling at White Cube and former Curator at the South London Gallery, joined forces with her husband to co-run the gallery in late 2020. In her partnership with Jay Jopling, she identified artists whose work had been rarely seen in the UK or had been unfairly overlooked, introducing Günther Förg, Minjung Kim, Lee Seung-Taek, Dóra Maurer, Park Seo-Bo and Peter Schuyff to the gallery, researching, sourcing and curating exhibitions of their work at White Cube’s London and Hong Kong galleries.The gallery programme is focused on emerging and mid-career artists from around the globe, showing them in London, Milan and Stockholm.

The gallery spaces eschew the white cube: an 18th century former townhouse in Mayfair, an 18th century former mental asylum in Stockholm and a late 19th century piano nobile apartment re-modelled in the early 1960s by the quintessential Milanese architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni. In addition to the gallery spaces, Kostyál regularly stages exhibitions in other unusual locations, most recently the Romantic castle Stora Sundby, in Sörmland, Sweden.