RIKKI NIEHAUS

Artist Statement   CV   Press Release

Rikki Niehaus is a figurative painter and portraitist who works in oil on canvas.  In her ongoing series, “Swedish Landscapes”, has executed a collection of portraits posed inside the home-interiors of an IKEA store.  This collection of oil paintings may seem benign, but they are in fact eerily engaging and humorously critical.  Rikki states: “Painting is, for me, a direct connection to the past, a chance to ‘time-travel’ and relate immediately to the whole of artistic tradition that preceded me.” Often Niehaus will compose her paintings in conversation with an iconic painting in the canon of Western Art history.  The series serves not only as a critique of consumer culture, but as a mirror to its artificiality and the illusions that we accept and desire, as reality.