Artist Biography

Valeria Talian is a Slovak-born contemporary artist who has made South Africa her home since 1990. Born in Bratislava in 1982 and currently based in Hermanus, she is a self-taught, full-time artist whose practice is defined by intuition, experimentation and an expressive use of colour. Growing up with a violinist father, creativity formed part of her early life, while childhood experiences in nature established a connection that continues to influence her work today.

As a child, Valeria spent hours creating imagined landscapes from flowers, pebbles and sticks in her grandmother’s garden, walking along the Danube and exploring the natural environment surrounding the family’s summer cabin. Moving to South Africa expanded both her physical and emotional landscape, introducing her to the contrasting colours, textures and natural richness of a country that would become her permanent home.

Valeria works predominantly in mixed media, combining acrylic paint, pastel, charcoal, texture mediums and sculptural elements. Her process is fluid and instinctive, often moving between several works simultaneously as ideas pass from one surface to another. Layers are built up, removed, sanded back and reworked until the composition achieves a balance that feels resolved both visually and emotionally.

Her work is abstract and intentionally non-representational, yet it is grounded in recognisable human emotions and experiences. Colour, form and texture become a language for nostalgia, comfort, hope and joy - allowing her to communicate feelings that resist literal description. Rather than prescribing a narrative, Valeria creates space for viewers to discover their own memories, associations and stories within each work.

In recent years, her visual language has become increasingly confident, vibrant and playful. Freedom and experimentation have become central to her practice, reflecting her belief that neither art nor life needs always to be approached with seriousness or rigidity. Inspired by nature and by the fearless individuality of artists such as Friedensreich Hundertwasser, she embraces spontaneity, movement and the unexpected.

For Valeria, being an artist is not simply a profession but a way of experiencing life. Her predominantly one-of-a-kind works are created as singular expressions that cannot be precisely repeated. Through colour, abstraction and intuitive mark-making, she seeks to create work that offers an immediate sense of energy and joy while leaving enough openness for a deeper and deeply personal connection to emerge.

Artist Statement

My practice is rooted in intuition - a place of freedom without restriction where the work unfolds instinctively rather than through rigid planning. I am interested in how abstract forms, colour and texture can hold emotion, familiarity and memory without needing to depict anything literally.

My process is fluid. I build surfaces through paint, sculptural elements and mark-making, continually adding, subtracting, sanding back and reworking. Sometimes a painting develops quickly; at other times I return to it over several weeks. I allow the work to tell me when it has reached a sense of balance and completion.

Nature has always nourished my creativity. From childhood memories of the Danube and my grandmother’s garden to the extraordinary natural environment of South Africa, I find inspiration in slowing down and noticing what surrounds me. Those observations often return to the work as colour, movement, energy or simply a feeling.

I am increasingly inspired by freedom and play. I believe we can bend the rules, experiment, trust our instincts and allow joy to lead us. My paintings are not intended to tell viewers what to see. Instead, I want them to become spaces where individual memories, dreams and emotions can surface and where each person can discover a story of their own.

I believe that each artwork eventually finds the person it belongs with. That connection is more than simply acquiring an object; it is a relationship based on recognition and feeling. Colour and form are my vocabulary, allowing me to express what I cannot always put into words and, hopefully, to create moments of joy, possibility and connection.

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