ANDREW VALKO
About Andrew Valko
Andrew Valko is a Canadian painter and printmaker whose hyperrealist works probe the tension between perception and narrative. He describes his work as “episodes in an ongoing, fragmentary narrative in which the viewers are obliged to read the suggestions, clues and hint and create their own story.”
Valko was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1957 and immigrated to Canada in 1968, where his family settled in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He studied Graphic Design and Applied Arts at Red River Community College. He later trained under master printmaker Toshi Yoshida at the Yoshida Hanga Academy in Tokyo, an experience that instilled in him the technical rigor and compositional clarity that remain hallmarks of his work.
Today, Valko lives and works between Winnipeg and Vancouver, drawing from North American urban landscapes and personal memories to craft visually arresting scenes layered with psychological ambiguity.
Valko’s paintings are often set in liminal spaces—neon-lit motel rooms, deserted parking lots, drive-in theatres—where anonymous figures inhabit moments of quiet introspection. Rendered with photographic precision, his compositions are steeped in cinematic atmosphere and charged with narrative potential. The viewer, cast as voyeur, is invited to complete the story from sparse emotional cues—a gaze turned away, a flicker of artificial light.
Over the course of his career, Valko has exhibited widely in solo and group shows across Canada, the U.S., and internationally. His work has been featured in Border Crossings, Canadian Art, The New Yorker, and The Globe and Mail. In 1994, he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and in 2009 he received the Kingston Prize for portraiture. Beyond his own studio practice, Valko has received commissions from the City of Winnipeg and the Manitoba government and was the subject of a CBC arts program.