Jan Valik, a painter based in London, holds his MA in Fine Arts from Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and continues in his MA in Painting at the Royal College of Arts in London. He was awarded a VUB Foundation Painting Prize 2016 in Slovakia, and recently he was shortlisted for Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021.

Jan Valik describes his paintings as fluid and fictive territories moving between perceptual ambiguities and evocation of otherness. Balancing abstract and figurative elements and exploring their tensions, his interest lies in the question of boundaries of how the external space affects the internal space. Exploring evocative spatial qualities, his works balance on pictorial ambiguities to disrupt conventional binaries of abstract and figurative.

Valik has participated in numerous Artist-in-Residence Programs notably at BankART (Yokohama, Japan, 2016), Mark Rothko Art Center, Daugavpils, Latvia, 2017; Banska Stanica Contemporary, Banska Stiavnica, Slovakia, 2018; Egon Schiele Art Centre, Cesky Krumlov, Czechia, 2018. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Canada, 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.