Amela Cikota

Amela Cikota is an abstract artist that works with collages and paintings. When painting, she uses vibrant colors, plays with textures, and experiments with depth. She is currently focusing more on her collages which incorporate a variety of materials. She enjoys the search for technology embedded paper such as player piano paper, computer punch tape, recording tape, etc. and combining them with more natural papers that have fibers and petals throughout. Creating the relationship between nature and technology on one surface.

Cikota, born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, moved to St. Louis in 1997. She has exhibited her artwork both locally and internationally. Cikota received her BFA in Art Education from the University of Missouri - St. Louis. She is currently a full time ceramics teacher at Oakville High School. She is also a resident artist at Soulard Art Gallery where she displays her work in her own little gallery.

About 7 years ago, Cikota bought a home and found the angles of the wall corners to be very interesting. She says, “It is a building made in 1915 and I can’t help but admire the detail in the simplest parts of the home like the ceiling in the stairwell, the beams in the bedroom, or the corners where one room meets another. I ended up photographing these spots in my house then painting them onto canvases where I included some of the actual paint that I used on the walls in the home.” Leftover blueprints from Amela’s time in architecture school have also ended up in her artwork. Cikota loves to garden and travel as well as going antiquing to find more materials. You can see these loves appear in her artwork.