“Emily Kraus: Balancing Control and Surrender” by Tena Saw

Emily Kraus’s paintings are stuttering fields of glitches and agitation that shake and swagger like a Warhol Elvis. Her debut New York solo exhibition at Luhring Augustine Tribeca arrives with a kind of procedural mythology already attached. The artist works inside a self-designed apparatus, feeding raw canvas through rollers, painting in collaboration with the machine. The paintings come into being from pressure, friction, and chance.

To make large work against the constraints of the 8 x 8-foot MFA studio she used during lockdown in 2020, Kraus constructed a giant box frame of steel with rollers affixed to the frame bars. Raw canvas is wrapped around the structure and sewn together to form a loop. She sits or lies inside the box and paints on the interior of the loop, then runs it around the rollers to produce copies of the original gestures across the canvas. Videos of her solitary act of painting make it clear that it is nonetheless performative. They also show that her machine is not a precision instrument but more like a lurching jalopy. It functions as a constraint that produces an eccentric visual intelligence. Initially hard and sharp painted marks naturally soften as they are printed over and over. Kraus then intervenes with simple hand-painted gestures to refine the composition.

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