Jan Valik completed his Master's degree in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London (2023–24), where he received the Rose Finn-Kelcey Bursary and the Vice Chancellor’s Achievement Scholarship. Prior to that, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague (MA 2012) and participated in the two-year Turps Studio program in London. The Slovak-born artist has long lived and worked in London.

His solo exhibitions include presentations in Japan (2024), “Small Infinities” in Vienna (2023), “Breakthrough” in Toronto (2022), and “Shifting Places” in Brussels (2022). In group exhibitions, his work regularly appears in the UK, USA, China, and other countries, including major global cities. This year, he completed an artist residency in Tokyo and is currently longlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2026.

Valik's paintings create fluid boundaries between external reality and internal experience. Through the layering of colors, spontaneous brushwork, and controlled strokes, they aim to capture the mutability of perception. In his work, the artist develops the themes of imaginative and fluid spaces, which are inscribed not only into oil and acrylic paintings but also into detailed watercolor collages, where the dynamics themselves shift into an almost contemplative exploration of cut-out structures and brushstrokes.

Jan Valik explores internal experience and perceptual instability on the borderline between reality and fiction. Through abstract painting, he creates fluid landscape in-between spaces and dreamlike inner worlds.

The title of the exhibition, At the Edge of Spectre, invites a closer examination of the artist’s painterly signature. The series of five smaller oil works, Atmospheres (24×35 cm and 27×35 cm), acts as anchored archetypes of the artist’s internal perception, evoking diverse landscape formations. Meanwhile, his large-scale canvases stand as standalone scenes, immersing the viewer in layered brushstrokes, shifting perspectives, and the core spatial construction of the image.

Formal affinities with Eastern landscape painting, subtle gestures, and dynamic contrast accents stem from the artist's residencies and travels in Asia. It was during these journeys that his latest cycle of detailed watercolors emerged—acting as intimate "systemic trials" that serve as the conceptual thread unifying the entire exhibition.