"Artist to Watch: Emily Kraus" by Victoria Woodcock

The first New York solo exhibition by Emily Kraus will debut April 10 at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca gallery

An impressive structure that is part jungle gym, part feat of precision engineering dominates the East London studio of artist Emily Kraus. It’s a setup that enables her to stretch her canvas over four poles to form a tube with a platform in the middle from which she works, spinning the composition by hand to make patterns with the paint.

The process “came out of working in small spaces,” says Kraus, a native New Yorker, who first moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art. “I had an eight-foot cube as my studio,” she recalls. “I was stretching canvas around the entire space, holding it in place with shower poles. I’d paint, and then I’d take a nap on it. My paintings are environments. In a way, they record the performance of life.”

Oil paint is applied via syringe, palette knife, and other means, then dragged across the surface. Multiple layers of marks build into abstract creations that are lyrical and rhythmic, simultaneously regimented and expressive. When the canvas is removed from its scaffolding, its evolution from tunnellike structure to vast open plain “reflects the expansiveness of the mind in captivity,” says Kraus, who draws inspiration from her studies in religion at Kenyon College in Ohio as well as her yoga and meditation practices.

Read full article at galeriemagazine.com