Jan Valik, a painter from Europe based in London, graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and is a recent Turps Alumni. He received the third place in the VUB Foundation Painting Prize (Slovakia, 2016) and recently he was shortlisted for Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021.
Paintings of Jan Valik are tangentially connected to the idea of landscape as a psychological space where relationship between human perception and the landscape consists of complex ties but also of fine nuances. His work balances on the edge of perception where abstract and figurative becomes fluid, evoked within a spatial and pictorial ambiguity interlocked with a tension of simultaneous presence and absence to disrupt conventional binaries of perception.
Valik’s painting practice is underscored by contemporary issues of global displacement and migration, environmental anxiety and posthumanist understanding of histories. Valik has participated in numerous Artist-in-Residence Programs notably at BankART (Japan, 2016), Mark Rothko Art Center (Latvia, 2017) and Egon Schiele Art Centre (Czechia, 2018). In 2020 he joined a 2-year long Turps Studio Programme in London.
His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Belgium, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia and Japan, as well as in group exhibitions in the UK and across Europe (Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Latvia, France and Ireland) as well as in China and Japan.