Annieo Klaas grew up in Dakar, Senegal. She holds a PharmD from Auburn University and a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington.
Klaas’s work has been exhibited in both galleries and museums, including the Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, AL), the LaGrange Art Museum (LaGrange, GA), the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile, AL), Sophiella Gallery (Mobile, AL), Samford Gallery (Birmingham, AL), and the Intersect Arts Center (St Louis, MO). Her most recent solo exhibition was held at the Mobile Arts Council (Mobile, AL). She completed a Residency at the Two Dot Schoolhouse (Two Dot, MT) and painted a permanent mural for an apartment building in Seattle, WA.
Her work has been featured in several publications, including New American Paintings (South Issue 178), Studio Visit Magazine, and the Artist’s magazine.
Klaas’s paintings operate within the quiet pulse of magical realism, where the ordinary becomes enchanted. Her most recent motif—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. These are not mere studies of windows; they are thresholds, inviting the viewer to dwell in the thin space between presence and imagination.
Selected Interviews: