Emily Kraus
Installation view of Emily Kraus: In Relation, Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York (April 11 – June 13, 2026). © Emily Kraus; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and The Sunday Painter, London. Photo: Farzad Owrang.
Space and its limitations were the implicit theme of the painter Emily Kraus’s impressive New York solo debut, “In Relation,” at Luhring Augustine (April 11–June 13). The six expansive, articulate abstractions on display were made with a mechanism that Kraus contrived while at the Royal College of Art to paint at scale in the eight-by-eight-foot studio she was assigned. Using four shower rods, Kraus made a scaffold around which she stretched large pieces of canvas she sewed together to create a kind of cube. She worked inside this room within a room, painting in oil on the canvas and then pulling it around the frame. The mechanism has changed a bit since her school days, but the results are similar: dense echoes of sinuous lines and clustered splatters, as if a Pollock had gotten stuck in an inkjet printer. The paint is striated with tendril-like creases left behind by the canvas’s uneven passage over the rollers.
Each of the paintings exhibited this spring posed a kind of paradox: they seemed equal parts manual and mechanical, and it was never quite clear to me which marks were made by the machine, and which were left by Kraus’s own hand.
Read full article at thedriftmag.com.
