Annieo Klaas grew up in Dakar, Senegal and is based in Birmingham, Alabama. She holds a PharmD from Auburn University, a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, and works as a Nuclear Pharmacist for Siemens Healthineers.
Klaas’s work has been exhibited at the Mobile Museum of Art (AL), the LaGrange Art Museum (GA), the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (AL), Field Projects Gallery (NY), Warnes Contemporary (NY), Sophiella Gallery (AL), K Space Contemporary (TX), and the Intersect Arts Center (St Louis, MO). Her work has been featured in several publications, including New American Paintings (South Issue 178) and Booooooom’s Tomorrow’s Talent.
Klaas’s paintings operate within the quiet pulse of magical realism, where the ordinary becomes enchanted. Her most recent motif of a sunlit window softened by gauzy curtains grounds the viewer in a familiar domestic setting, yet the scenes shimmer with an otherworldly quality. Radiant colors bleed across surfaces, and the layering of light, shadow, and foliage suggests a reality subtly heightened, vibrating just beyond the logical. Like the literary tradition of magical realism, Klaas doesn’t abandon the real; instead, she infuses it with wonder, illuminating the poetic strangeness that lives in plain sight. Her treatment of light is less about optics than emotion, rendered with a dreamlike clarity that feels both tender and uncanny. More than just windows, these are thresholds, inviting the viewer to dwell in the thin space between presence and imagination.
Selected Interviews: