Valery Koshlyakov was born in Salsk .
He is a painter, graphic artist, the author of objects and installations. He lives and works in Moscow and Paris.
In the late 1980s, having graduated from the Grekov Art College in Rostov-on-Don, Valery Koshlyakov worked as a stage designer in the regional Theatre of Musical Comedy. There he created a series of works entitled "Decoration of the Beautiful", which brought Koshlyakov fame in art circles. Subsequently this series' name was used as the title of the exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery (2012−2013) that explored the nature of the beauty of kitsch in 20th-century Art.

In 1991, with forward-looking Rostov artists from the "Art or Death" group, he became one of the founders of the legendary "Gallery in Trekhprudny".

n the artist's own words, his pictures are like "frescoes which have faded over time, or like the "artworks" of labourers who painted over an image and then someone else came along and washed that off".

Today, Valery Koshlyakov is one of the most famous and sought-after Russian artists at home and abroad. His paintings have been exhibited in the major museums of Europe and America — the Louvre, the State Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Museum of Modern Art in Rome, the Pompidou Centre, and the Kennedy Art Center in Washington. The artist's works are in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art (Avignon, France) and others. He has participated in three Venice Biennales.

Koshlyakov became known as the artist working in an unusual technique — painting on used multi-layered corrugated cardboard. Parts are torn and dangling, exposing the structure of the material and often hiding fragments of the image; the paint is applied on the protruding ribs of the cardboard — all of this creates a 3-D effect, going beyond the boundaries of the picture surface. Painter, graphic artist, author of objects and installations. Works with «mythical empires» images, mixing Greek, Roman architecture and sculpture, Gothic, Baroque and Stalinist Empire. Painting on a cardboard in the 90's formed his recognizable manner (blurry brushstrokes, paint dashes), then he also started writing on canvas. The works remind memories or visions from the future.