Surrealism Meets Class Divide: Louis Pohl Koseda’s Art Is What the UK Feels Like Right Now

Lon­don-based artist Louis Pohl Kose­da is emerg­ing as one of the most dis­tinc­tive chron­i­clers of con­tem­po­rary British life. His intri­cate, fine-line draw­ings map a tur­bu­lent, often absurd land­scape of eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty, social dys­func­tion, and spir­i­tu­al long­ing, at once sharply observed and myth­i­cal­ly charged.

Raised in East Lon­don with­in a Hare Krish­na upbring­ing, Kose­da grew up steeped in spir­i­tu­al doc­trine while sur­round­ed by the socioe­co­nom­ic con­tra­dic­tions of one of the UK’s most divid­ed cities. This unique upbring­ing, fol­lowed by his pro­fes­sion­al work close­ly tied with Lon­don’s most under-served com­mu­ni­ties, a cross­roads of mys­ti­cism and urban real­ism, con­tin­ues to inform his work. Ref­er­ences to Hin­du epics and Chris­t­ian escha­tol­ogy are woven through his visu­al lan­guage, cul­mi­nat­ing in ambi­tious pieces like his own inter­pre­ta­tion of a “Last Judge­ment”, where the divine and the bureau­crat­ic col­lide.

Far from mere­ly being reli­gious alle­gories in dis­guise, Koseda’s works are also acts of social research and doc­u­men­ta­tion. “Draw­ing is both action and research,” he says. “Through the prism of the imag­i­na­tion, we get clos­er to truth. The pieces are drawn in a live dia­logue with the world around us. By reveal­ing how social sys­tems are con­struct­ed, I am invit­ing the view­er to co-cre­ate them.” There’s a clar­i­ty and con­vic­tion in his aim: to make vis­i­ble the invis­i­ble struc­tures that shape mod­ern life, be they eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, or spir­i­tu­al.

From Architecture to Activism to Art

Before devot­ing him­self to fine art, Kose­da trained as an archi­tect at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sheffield. There, he co-found­ed the Food­hall Project, a com­mu­ni­ty kitchen built on prin­ci­ples of social inclu­sion and food jus­tice, and lat­er launched the Nation­al Food Ser­vice, a broad­er move­ment to reimag­ine food access as a pub­lic good. These projects gar­nered recog­ni­tion, includ­ing the RIBA MacE­wan Award and mul­ti­ple Civic Trust Awards, not to men­tion a World Archi­tec­ture Fes­ti­val Award in the cat­e­go­ry of “Rethink and Renew.”

The expe­ri­ences gained from these ini­tia­tives direct­ly feed into his artis­tic ethos. Much like his social­ly dri­ven archi­tec­tur­al work, Koseda’s draw­ings aim to reveal, reform, and reimag­ine; serv­ing as mark­ers of con­flict and con­tra­dic­tion in UK soci­ety, from which point fur­ther fur­ther work can begin.

The Drawings: Opera as Allegory, Satire as Mirror

Koseda’s most recent body of work, pre­sent­ed in part through his Roy­al Draw­ing School res­i­den­cy, adopts a curi­ous frame­work: a fic­tion­al opera. But this opera, he insists, is “real.” It’s a vehi­cle for stag­ing the the­atrics of British soci­ety: its hypocrisies, fail­ures, and glim­mers of human­i­ty. From home­less shel­ters and hous­ing estates to cre­ative stu­dios, finan­cial dis­tricts, and pub­lic trans­port, each scene is a com­pressed tableau of real lives and imag­ined rit­u­als.

One of his stand­out works, Peak Inter­est: London’s Hous­ing Cycle and its Social Effect, depicts spec­tral fig­ures float­ing adrift in a claus­tro­pho­bic, spec­u­la­tive Lon­don. The draw­ing is a direct reac­tion to Koseda’s own expe­ri­ence nav­i­gat­ing the city’s bru­tal hous­ing mar­ket, refract­ed through eco­nom­ic the­o­ry and sym­bol­ic nar­ra­tive.

Oth­er works sketch com­muters on night bus­es, financiers in the City of Lon­don dur­ing moments of mar­ket col­lapse, and even the Julian Assange protests, all ren­dered with the tech­ni­cal intri­ca­cy of a Her­cules Segers land­scape and the grotesque hon­esty of a Hon­oré Dau­mi­er sketch, a visu­al equiv­a­lent to the bru­tal social real­ism found in the lyrics of Sleaford Mods.

His recur­ring themes: job inse­cu­ri­ty, con­sumerism, the NHS, edu­ca­tion cuts, hous­ing short­ages, eco­nom­ic infla­tion, polit­i­cal alien­ation, and the spec­ta­cle of social media, coa­lesce into a kind of mod­ern moral the­ater. His work doesn’t mor­al­ize, but it does insist on com­plex­i­ty, on con­tra­dic­tion, and on crit­i­cal­ly see­ing the sys­tems we usu­al­ly take for grant­ed.

Recognition and Relevance

Koseda’s work has been exhib­it­ed inter­na­tion­al­ly, includ­ing in the British Pavil­ion at the 2020 Venice Bien­nale, and he received the Christie’s Award this year. His pieces res­onate with crit­ics and view­ers alike not just because of their com­plex visu­al detail, but because they offer some­thing increas­ing­ly rare in con­tem­po­rary art: coher­ent, unsanc­ti­mo­nious, and ground­ed social cri­tique.

By col­laps­ing the bound­ary between doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion, Koseda’s draw­ings serve as maps to a spir­i­tu­al-polit­i­cal Lon­don, where class ten­sion, bureau­cra­cy, mythol­o­gy, and imag­i­na­tion all share the same stage. His imag­ined opera may be fic­tion­al, but the truths it reveals are uncom­fort­ably real.