Visual Arts Faculty

Ricki Klages

Department Head: Professor, Painting

Email: rlk@uwyo.edu • Website: www.rickiklages.com
Phone: 307.766.3269 • Office: VA 110A 

B.F.A., University of Arizona, 1984.
M.A., University of New Mexico, 1991; M.F.A., 1993.

About

Ricki Klages was born in Stuttgart, Germany. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and her MA and MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio; University of Montana, Missoula, Montana; Epping Forest Museum, Waltham Abbey, United Kingdom; the Joint Research Center, Ispra, Italy, Galerie Knud Grothe, Copenhagen, Denmark and Colorida Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal. She has received many awards in Juried exhibitions, including the jurors' choice award from The Butler Institute of American Art, Baer Award in Painting from the Wyoming Arts Council, Best in Show from "Art and Language", Highstown, New Jersey, and two Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship Grants. She was featured in juried publications, "New American Paintings" and the “International Painting Annual 1 through 6, #8 (third place award winner) and #9.

Ricki started teaching at the University of Wyoming in the Art and Art History Program in 1995. She is represented by William Havu Gallery, Denver, Colorado. She is the Department Head of the Art and Art History Program at the University of Wyoming.

 

Artist Statement

There is a magical moment that happens when through this liquid medium, color and edge and value combine to create a window into another world that speaks to reality, yet is only this flat surface with color. It is the creation of illusion that I most want to capture in my paintings in addition to a narrative that can take the viewer through intriguing pathways. I have been fascinated by detritus: things accumulating in gutters, fireplaces and compost piles. There is a beauty in decomposition and refuse, and I have revisited this subject matter in several bodies of work.

I am Baroque in my color sensibility and reference historical painting, but my aesthetic is contemporary as are the cultural references and the Magical Realism to which I adhere, along with a healthy dose of Victorian symbolism. My paintings reflect the influence of the places I have seen, visited, or lived in. All of these environments are referenced either directly or more subtly within my paintings. I paint from a desire for beauty and ‘otherness’; of transcendent moments that still occur in dreams, memory and magic moments in nature. I want to capture the sense of the routine and the ritual, the sublime with the mundane and how they can mix in equal parts.

 

Samples of Work: