Emily Kraus
444 days
Fondazione Bonollo Arte Contemporanea, Thiene, Italy
October 7 – November 30, 2024
In conversation with curator Lisa Modiano
Courtesy of Fondazione Bonollo - video by Giovanni Canova
Emily Kraus
Claustral 1, 2023
Oil on canvas
149 5/8 x 110 1/4 inches
(380 x 280 cm)
Born from a dynamic interplay between order and intuition, control and surrender, logic and spontaneity, Emily Kraus’s paintings reveal a strange and forceful harmony of form. In response to a confined studio space and inspired by her background in somatic and meditative practices, she built a system that inverts the traditional choreography of painter and medium. Kraus loops raw canvas around four stainless steel struts that function as rollers and anchor the corners of her cube-like apparatus. Moving within this cocoon-like enclosure, she applies paint, pulling the canvas around the structure, which in turn smears, spreads, and unfolds the pigment. Harnessing the idiosyncrasies of her apparatus—part artist’s tool, part mechanical instrument—Kraus calibrates and exploits the fluctuations of chance in a productive, agonistic exchange.
The entirety of each painting is revealed to Kraus only once she frees the canvas from her mechanism. While working, she is able to view no more than a narrow section of the composition at a time, which requires her to rely on visual memory much in the way a musician depends on auditory recollection when composing a melody. Consequently, embedded within the paintings are the temporal and kinetic forces of their making. Kraus’s works vibrate with an underlying rhythm, echoed in the steady pulse of vertical lines that structure their surface—akin to a metronome’s unwavering beat—which serves as a counterpoint to the wild, unfettered sprawl of color across the canvas. Stuttering eloquently, her compositions reverberate and continually evolve, evoking the patterns that permeate nature—the markings on a snakeskin, the ripples of waves, or the cadence of one’s breath. Each painting is a meditation on the present moment, weaving layers of time to contain its own history.
Kraus was born in New York in 1995, and lives and works in London. She received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London, and a BA in Religious Studies from Kenyon College. Recent solo exhibitions include: 444 Days at Fondazione Bonollo in Vicenza, Italy (2024); A man and a woman and a blackbird at Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway (2024); Ouroboros at Galería Mascota, Mexico City (2024); Nest Time at The Sunday Painter, London (2023). She has also been featured in numerous group shows, among them: Nine Rules of Tremulation at Noname, Paris, France (2024); Patterns at Luhring Augustine, New York (2024); Bloomberg New Contemporaries at Camden Art Centre, London (2024); Painting, as It Were at Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf (2024); Echoes Across Surfaces at Duarte Sequeira, Portugal (2023); Matija Čop and Emily Kraus at Sapling Gallery, London (2023); and My Mother was a Computer at Indigo+Madder, London (2022). Kraus was selected as one of The Artsy Vanguard 2025, is a recipient of the Hopper Prize, and was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize.
* Top image: Installation view courtesy of Fondazione Bonollo (2024). Photo: Giovanni Canova.
Emily Kraus
444 days
Fondazione Bonollo Arte Contemporanea, Thiene, Italy
October 7 – November 30, 2024
In conversation with curator Lisa Modiano
Courtesy of Fondazione Bonollo - video by Giovanni Canova
Emily Kraus
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway
June 7 – July 5, 2024
Courtesy of Galleri Opdahl | Photo: Bitmap/Markus Johansson
Emily Kraus
Nest Time
The Sunday Painter, London
April 27 – June 10, 2023
Courtesy of The Sunday Painter
For more information, please contact Donald Johnson Montenegro at donald@luhringaugustine.com.
