Annieo Klaas grew up in Dakar, Senegal, and is based in Birmingham, Alabama. She holds a PharmD from Auburn University and 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 Future Fair (NY), Field Projects (NY), Warnes Contemporary (NY), the Gadsden Art Museum (AL), Mobile Museum of Art (AL), LaGrange Art Museum (GA), and Alabama Contemporary Art Center (AL), among others. She recently received a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in support of her residency at Mudhouse Residency in Crete, Greece. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings (South Issue 178) and Booooooom’s Tomorrow’s Talent.
Klaas’s paintings operate within the quiet logic of magical realism, exploring the instability of perception through light, shadow, transparency, and reflection. Windows recur throughout the work as thresholds- structures that simultaneously reveal, conceal, and separate one space from another. Gauzy curtains interrupt what can be seen; shadows point toward things beyond the frame; reflections collapse interior and exterior space. At times, it becomes difficult to determine whether an image exists behind a surface, upon it, or only as an effect of light.
Rather than depicting light as an object, Klaas treats it as an event: something temporary that passes through architecture, atmosphere, and attention, continually redrawing the spaces it touches. Familiar domestic scenes become perceptually unstable as foliage dissolves into shadow, color migrates across surfaces, and recognizable forms hover between presence and disappearance. Like magical realism in literature, Klaas’s work does not abandon the real, but allows something strange to emerge quietly from within it. Her paintings invite the viewer to linger in that uncertainty, at the threshold between what is present and what is perceived.
Selected Interviews: