Bio
Emily Klass was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied sculpture, and completed an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2020. She spent more than a decade in Brooklyn, New York, developing her studio practice before returning to the Intermountain West.
She currently works between Park City, Utah and Los Angeles, California. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Wythe Hotel (Brooklyn, NY) and NYU Langone Hospitals, as well as in private collections nationwide. Klass has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Venice, Italy. She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, and her work has been featured in regional and national newspapers and magazines.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I paint the mountains and deserts of the West not as they look, but as they feel to me. Working with acrylics on canvas, I allow the raw energy of the Rockies to dictate my process, letting color and texture drive the composition rather than allowing specific places to dictate the image. My work is an attempt to capture the vibrating, powerful presence these landscapes leave with me long after the time spent in them is over.
On the canvas, the landscape shifts. Peaks might grow to impossible heights—mountains upon mountains making their way into the clouds. This landscape provides a blueprint for me to explore the emotional resonance of the colors themselves. I’m less interested in literal topography and more in the visceral rush of the experience: the way birdsong drifts through the forest; the scent of baking dirt, wet granite, or decomposing leaves; the green, red, and golden ripple of aspen leaves; the sudden shock of wildflowers in June. The feeling of this is translated into pigment.
My paintings act as a form of meditation, a counterweight to the noise of our high-tech, hyper-connected lives. Each canvas is an accumulation. Brushstroke after brushstroke, colors interact and build until the right emotional weight is reached. These are highly saturated spaces where I process the friction between contemporary overwhelm and the profound peace found in the wild.
Contact: hi@emilyklass.com
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