Nikolay Koshelev

Nikolay Koshelev (b. 1987, Moscow) is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, large-scale installations, and theatrical set design. He lives and works between Paris, Dubai, and New York.

Koshelev’s practice developed through a combination of rigorous academic training and early involvement in graffiti culture. His work brings together traditional techniques with contemporary visual languages, including post-Internet aesthetics and references to game design. Across painting, ceramics, and installation, he constructs immersive, imaginary worlds populated by recurring figures, animals, and hybrid beings.

His visual language weaves together diverse historical and cultural references: Edo-period Japanese painting, Scandinavian mythology, and Russian Symbolism intersect with modernist abstraction, surrealist imagery, and graffiti elements. Echoing the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle decadence and the occult, his work reinterprets these influences through a contemporary lens.

Using a palette of pinks, blues, silvers, and ochres, Koshelev creates dreamlike, ambiguous environments that evoke theatrical stages, museum spaces, and imagined landscapes. His ceramic and enamel works extend this approach, drawing on Symbolist traditions in applied arts while integrating abstraction and experimental surfaces. Across media, his work reflects a renewed interest in mysticism, intuition, and symbolic thinking in contemporary culture.

He studied at the Moscow Academic Art Lyceum at the Surikov Art Institute before earning an MA in Monumental and Decorative Painting from the Stroganov Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry in 2010. He later completed an MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2014, where he studied under Eric Fischl and Margaret Bowland and received the Dedalus Foundation Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.