Alexander Barkoff was Russian/Polish with possible decent from Finland.

He studied painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts, St. Petersburg and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, he fled his country never to return again.

The main source of information about his life is documented in his works: Barkoff usually inscribed the place and calendar year on his paintings.

He travelled to Paris and according to Benezit Dictionary of Artists, he exhibited at the 1923 Salon d'Automne. From his Parisian period survive an oil of a female nude and three watercolours. Works depicting Jerusalem and the Holy Land indicate that he travelled to Palestine, before arriving in Greece in the mid-1920s. In the late 1920s/ early 1930s he lived in Thessaloniki for three years and then settled down in Athens. 

The study of the whole of Barkoff’s work leaves no doubt of great talent. He worked in an expressionistic manner, with influences from his contemporary Erich Heckel and other expressionists that worked the medium of watercolour. Peculiar perspective, distortion and unreal scale are all elements that are characteristic in his work. He is a painter of urban areas that depicted monuments of Jerusalem, Thessaloniki and Athens, but also neighbourhood streets, street markets or squares and generally crowd meeting places.

His surviving work consists of a large number of watercolours and few oils. Additionally, he worked in charcoal, ink and coloured pencil. Barkoff’s body of expressionist work predates the watercolours of Georgios Bouzianis.

In 2000 the Benaki Museum staged a large-scale retrospective titled ‘Barkoff in Greece’. His work is found in the National Gallery of Greece, the Municipal Gallery of Athens, the Municipal Gallery of Rhodes, the Benaki Museum and many public and private collections.