"10 Rising British Artists to Watch at This Year's 'New Contemporaries'" by Bella Bonner-Evans

Established in 1949, “New Contemporaries” remains the foremost annual survey of U.K.-based art students and recent graduates. With prestigious alumni including Paula Rego, Chris Ofili, Tacita Dean, and Mona Hatoum, the exhibition each year presents an undeniable opportunity to glimpse the practices that will shape the future of contemporary art. Returning to Camden Art Centre for the first time in over 20 years, the exhibition is on show in London through April 14th, having previously been presented at Blackpool’s Grundy Art Gallery.

The 2024 edition, curated by leading artists Helen Cammock, Sunil Gupta, and Heather Phillipson, features 55 emerging talents selected from a nationwide open call. Including a refreshingly diverse range of artists from many regions and backgrounds, the exhibition ricochets between mediums, methodologies, and ideologies.

Having graduated in 2022, Emily Kraus has already been heralded for her distinctive approach to painting. Currently represented by The Sunday Painter, she presented her debut solo show with the gallery in 2023, alongside group exhibitions at Matt’s Gallery and Sapling in London. In the same year, she won the Hopper Prize and was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize.

Kraus’s method is highly unusual: To make her paintings, she stands inside a cage-like frame with a raw canvas looped around it. She then uses the struts of the metal cube as rollers, adding dabs of paint to the material then manually pulling it around the structure. In this way, she creates her recognizable linear marks. Having devised this technique to reconfigure the spatial constraints of her assigned studio at the Royal College of Art, she has come to rely on it as a way of expressing the cyclical rhythms of the natural world.

Read full article at artsy.net