Across its two floors in London’s Mayfair, Upsilon Gallery unfolds a three-part study in structure. On the ground level, Zhang Xiaodong and Matija Cop explore two distinct logics of folding—material, bodily, architectural—in their duo exhibition FOLDED VOICES. Below, Louis Pohl Koseda reimagines London as a psychic and painterly landscape in SURREAL ESTATES, where the city’s edges blur into something more interior.
Though the three artists work from different geographies and lineages, their practices converge around a shared fascination with systems—how they hold, bend, or quietly reshape the world. On opening night, as more than 400 visitors drifted through the gallery, that underlying structural clarity only sharpened: the works stood steady amid the movement, revealing their calm, methodical logic.
On the ground floor, Folded Voices approaches structure through material, forming the most introspective chapter of the exhibition. Zhang Xiaodong’s works—rooted in the revival of the Tang-dynasty Dragon Scale Binding technique—transform book pages into sculpture. His hand-dyed Xuan paper, folded, rolled and left to settle, acquires a tectonic presence: paper is no longer a light surface but a slowly forming material architecture. As one of the finalists of the 2025 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize, and previously a featured artist at the China Pavilion during London Craft Week, Zhang has positioned himself at the intersection of cultural heritage and contemporary visual language.
At first glance, paper seems to be the centre of his practice; yet its true core lies in how folding and curling expose an “internal order” embedded within the material. Zhang reveals not merely the structure of paper, but the structural logic of time, labour and tradition. His most significant intervention is the transformation of the book from a two-dimensional vessel of information into a three-dimensional temporal entity.
Historically designed to allow pages to unfurl like scales, Dragon Scale Binding becomes, in Zhang’s hands, a conceptual apparatus. He lets the pages bend through rolling and gravity, turning gaps, arcs and shadows into visualised strata of time, enabling the book to be re-understood through looking rather than reading. His Diamond Sutra project (2010) marked a shift in which a Buddhist scripture moved from religious text to temporal structure.
Although his works carry spiritual resonance, they do not rely on religious narrative; instead, they propose a mode of slowness and inwardness acutely missing from contemporary life. Through craft, Zhang recovers a form of spiritual attention—one built not on doctrine but on the rhythms of material itself.
?op’s works emerge from an entirely different system. Constructed from EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate), his foldable, modular units function like linguistic morphemes or the disciplined rhythms of a trained body. His background—split between professional sprinting and philology—naturally infiltrates his visual language: repetition, symmetry and breath-like mechanics organise his sculptural forms. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose works have entered major public collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and his practice has been recognised with awards such as the 2025 Developing Your Creative Practice Grant from Arts Council England and multiple grants from the Croatian Ministry of Culture.
His sculptures trace the mutable architecture of identity. They operate as assemblable bodies—grammatical structures built to shift, hinge, and adapt within space. Each modular element can fold, interlock, repeat, dissolve, and re-form, rendering the works less like fixed objects than compilable, rewritable codes of the body. This logic draws from his years as a sprinter: a body in motion is never static, but a continual recalibration of force, fold, and release.
At the same time, Cop’s linguistic training permeates the work. His modules repeat without sameness, combine without fixed syntax, expand and collapse like a language that both expresses and conceals. This gives his sculptures a productive incompleteness—one that feels open-ended yet internally coherent, awaiting further assembling, extending or interpreting.
Growing up in Croatia during the political turbulence of the 1990s and coming of age as a gay man in a post-communist society, Cop is acutely sensitive to the visibility and invisibility of identity. The tension between fragility and resilience within his EVA structures becomes a metaphor for the negotiation of selfhood under social pressure. Through modular construction, he sculpts a body that can be folded, protected, reconfigured—ultimately pointing to the linguistic, cultural and political forces that shape who we are.
If the materiality upstairs points to systemic logics at a micro scale, Louis Pohl Koseda’s solo exhibition below expands the framework to that of the city. His drawings, with their fine, dense linework and compositions hovering between realism and allegory, aim to construct London as a layered social and psychic system. Raised within an East London Hare Krishna community, Koseda’s hybrid background—British urbanity, South Asian religious influence and architectural training—forms a distinctive narrative lens. His achievements reflect this hybrid trajectory: he is the recipient of the 2023 Christie’s Award and the 2024 RBA Rising Stars Award, and his socially engaged architectural work contributed to the MacEwen Award-winning Sheffield Foodhall project.
Encountering his drawings for the first time, what stands out is the confident looseness of the brushwork, the harmony of colour, and a classical sense of modelling—clear signs of his formidable technical grounding. Yet beneath this painterly ease lies a deeper structural proposition: his works depict the city as a system, not as scenery. For Koseda, the city is composed of flows of people, accumulations of memory, cultural overlays, social tensions and ethical frictions. The lines in his compositions resemble architectural sketches as much as systems diagrams, a reflection of his former training as an architect.
Each painting feels like a scan of what the city is “thinking” at a given moment—its invisible infrastructures of emotion, morality and movement. His London is both familiar and estranged, compressed into pictorial planes with a cosmic sense of structure, as though mapping the consciousness of the city itself.
Unlike the pure materiality upstairs, Koseda’s paintings extend from years of urban and community practice. His involvement in spatial projects—from the Southbank Undercroft preservation campaign to his contributions exhibited at the British Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale—provides his paintings with a social depth. They resist illustrative narrative; instead, they critique how cities organise and are organised by their inhabitants. His system is not material but social: people, memory, identity and planning are woven into the texture of his cityscapes.
What Koseda ultimately constructs is a psychic structure of the city—an internal activity rather than an external form. His London is not a topography but an inner terrain shaped by culture, politics and lived experience.
The strength of Upsilon Gallery’s programme lies in the tension between its two floors. The ground floor turns toward microstructures of the human—of identity and belief—while downstairs expands toward the broader structures of the body and the city. Moving between the floors becomes a physical traversal across three systemic scales. On an opening night marked by density and movement, the stillness of the works stood out sharply—holding their own tempo against the pace of the crowd.
What emerges is not merely a pairing of exhibitions, but an architecture of structures—a curatorial proposition that treats the building itself as an active thinking space. By setting three artists with sharply distinct vocabularies within a single conceptual frame, Upsilon Gallery advances a rare clarity of vision: a willingness to let material, identity, and urban experience speak across scales, and a confidence in the readerly intelligence of its audience.
In a city crowded with exhibitions chasing immediacy or spectacle, Upsilon offers something slower and more deliberate—a rigorous, system-led conversation unfolding across two floors and three practices. It reaffirms the gallery’s growing position as a site where thoughtful artistic inquiry is not only shown, but allowed to take shape.
Surreal estates: Louis Pohl Koseda solo exhibition & Folded voices: Zhang Xiaodong & Matija Cop, 13th November 2025 – 31st January 2026 Upsilon Gallery
