Louis Pohl Koseda (b. 1991) is an emerging British artist whose practice moves between drawing, painting, and architectural thinking and centres on the city as both subject and structure. His compositions, often developed from imagination, combine figurative scenes with fragmented urban environments, producing images that feel intimate yet systemic. Fine line drawing underpins his practice, forming the basis for layered paintings in which figures, symbols, and spatial elements interact.
Raised in a Hare Krishna community in East London, his early environment informs a sensitivity to systems of belief, behaviour, and collective life. Today, rather than depicting specific places, his works construct mnemonic cityscapes: psychological and social landscapes shaped by memory, observation, and inference.
Figures in Formation
In The Dawn of the Golden Age (2025), figures are staged within compressed, almost theatrical spaces where architecture appears both present and unstable. Bodies gather, disperse, and hesitate, suggesting a choreography of everyday life that resists resolution. As part of this series, in Capital at Risk (2024), figures appear embedded within systems they neither fully control nor escape. These compositions accumulate gestures, glances, and postures that begin to map the city’s social fabric.
Across his work, Koseda explores the behaviour of individuals within shared environments, often staging moments of tension, ambiguity, or moral complexity. His paintings function less as depictions and more as propositions, visual structures through which social dynamics can be examined.
Emerging from his drawing-led process, Koseda’s images retain a sense of openness even when translated into paint. Symbolic elements recur, thresholds, architectural fragments and clustered groups of figures, but operate less as fixed signs and more as shifting anchors, allowing meaning to remain unstable.
Outside London, Journey to Goloka Vrindavan (2022) weaves architecture, nature, and figure into a devotional landscape reflecting personal and cultural memory. Drawing on his upbringing and research into sacred structures, the work situates human behaviour within both cosmic and social systems, suggesting that the city, real or imagined, functions as a repository of layered meaning. Figures gather, disperse, and hesitate; systems press upon them while also framing them, inviting viewers to navigate the moral and social currents of contemporary life.
Koseda describes his approach as part of a developing tendency he calls “metafictionism” or “matterfictionism,” in which “true stories are told through the formal techniques traditionally associated with fiction.” Symbolism and narrative re-emerge as central tools, enabling constructed images to engage with lived realities. Fiction is not an escape from reality but a method for structuring it.
The Gallery as Picture Book
This conceptual framework extends to exhibition-making. Drawing on architectural theory, Koseda considers the gallery a spatial narrative device, a “picture book” in which works operate collectively. In exhibitions such as The Dawn of the Golden Age, paintings function less as isolated objects and more as interconnected scenes, unfolding across space. Architecture and image converge, turning the gallery itself into a mnemonic structure, echoing traditions in which built environments served as repositories of cultural memory.
Koseda positions drawing as both method and language, a means of constructing worlds rather than merely recording them. Across his work, the city becomes a site of accumulation: gestures, symbols, and behaviours layering together to form a shifting image of contemporary life.
He studied Architecture at the University of Sheffield before completing The Drawing Year postgraduate programme at the Royal Drawing School in 2023. Koseda’s interdisciplinary background is reflected in a range of awards spanning art and architecture, including the Christie’s Award (2023), the RBA Rising Stars Award (2024), and earlier distinctions such as an RIBA MacEwan Award and Civic Trust Awards. In 2025, Koseda presented his debut solo exhibition, The Dawn of the Golden Age, at Christie’s London, marking a significant milestone. That year, his work also featured in group exhibitions at the Design Museum, London (Artificial Show), the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (John Moores Painting Prize), Saint James’ Palace (The Power of Drawing), the Royal Society of British Artists Annual Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, and the Royal Drawing School Alumni Summer Show in Shoreditch. He also presented his solo Capital at Risk exhibition at Old Queen Street Gallery. Koseda’s work has been shown internationally, including at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2021).
Metafictions of Post-Post-Post Modernism is currently on view at the Hypha Studios x recessed.space Gallery 2 at No.1 Poultry, London, until April 18.
