Valeri Larko

Valeri Larko (born 1960) is an American painter of urban and industrial landscapes. She is known for her cityscapes, painted en plein air.

Born in Freeport on Long Island, New York, Larko grew up in Parsippany, New Jersey. She trained at the DuCret School of the Arts in Plainfield, New Jersey, and at New York's Art Students League and the National Academy of Design (now the National Academy Museum and School). In 1986 she moved to Jersey City. The surrounding area's industrial parks and infrastructure, much of it rusting and derelict, changed her focus from her original pursuit as a figure painter to an interpreter of urban landscape. Moving to Summit, New Jersey, in 1989, the industrial fringes of northern New Jersey's cities remained central to Larko's work for several years until 2004, when she moved to the suburb of New Rochelle, New York. With proximity to New York City, Larko's work incorporated the urban core of the city's boroughs, including the topography, infrastructure, and abundance of graffiti-covered walls.

Since the 1980s, Larko has created her paintings on site, setting up her easel in salvage yards, industrialized marshlands, under highways, on rooftops, and on city streets. By the early 1990s, she was painting northern New Jersey's rusted bridges, derelict gas tanks, abandoned factories, and decaying docks, in works such as 1991's "BP Port, Newark".

During the period of the late 1980s, after her move to Jersey City, Larko's paintings of industrial New Jersey began as generalized landscapes. These works eventually became more specific, close-up views within the area's industrial parks. From 1990 to 1995, she completed the Tank Series, a cycle of sixty paintings which examined the sculptural qualities of the monumental chemical tanks found in northern New Jersey.

From 1999 to 2003, Larko executed the Salvage Yard Series, working eight hours a day on location at the Kucharski Yard, an active salvage yard in Hackettstown, New Jersey, treating the salvage debris as sculpture, mass, color and texture, the deterioration lending the debris a patina. Working in oil on linen, the series comprises sixty paintings of various sizes, including monumental works of five and six feet, and smaller works on paper. In 2005, the Salvage Series was exhibited by the Arts Guild of Rahway, New Jersey, and in 2006 the Safe-T Gallery in Brooklyn mounted a solo show of the series.

After moving to New Rochelle in 2004, proximity to New York City afforded Larko an expanded view of the urban fringe. Though concentrating on the nearby borough of the Bronx, Larko also travelled to the city's more distant boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, documenting an urban fringe which was still in use, i.e., Brooklyn's industrialized Gowanus canal, Newtown Creek at the border of Brooklyn and Queens.

In 2012, Larko began "A Bronx Block", a 20-painting cycle documenting Boone Avenue and its graffiti-laced neighborhood. The Ferris-Stahl-Meyer meat processing plant, with the consent of the company president, Guillermo O. Gonzalez, had become a magnet for graffiti artists from the Bronx and elsewhere around New York City. The Ferris-Stahl-Meyer plant was demolished in November and December 2014 to make way for the Compass Residences development, a project consisting of 1,300 apartments and 46,000 square feet of retail space. Painting on location, Larko documented Boone Avenue's graffiti covered walls. Her project attracted local residents, affording her "personal interaction with the people I meet there. While talking to people in the area, I learn a lot about the sites that I am painting." Prominent New York graffiti artists who have contributed to the art on the Ferris-Stahl-Meyer building's walls, have recognized their images in Larko's paintings.

Larko's graffiti-laced paintings, apart from the Bronx Block series, were part of the Bronx Museum of the Arts year-long exhibition of summer 2012 to summer 2013, "Bronx Lab: Style Wars".