Emily Kraus
Emily Kraus in her studio. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
This young painter, fresh out of the Royal College of Art, has already developed her own, very distinctive way of method of painting, producing vivid and dramatic textured works
At the Sunday Painter, Emily Kraus (b1995) is showing five original and confident paintings, all made this year. Upstairs are two works from her Stochastic series, begun in 2022, while studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA). Downstairs is a trio from her more recent Nest Time series, each approaching four metres high and hung to form a triptych, that both envelopes and towers over the viewer. They are at once meditative and dramatic, weaving together gesture, pattern and colour into complex, multilayered wholes. Seen on a screen, Kraus’s paintings appear explicitly digital, as if a modernist abstraction had been glitched by a rudimentary piece of software. In the flesh, this reference falls away. They are vivid, textured, physical things, even if their vividness and their physicality contain within it something wonderfully elusive and transitory.
The method behind the paintings is unusual. With limited studio space at the RCA, Kraus constructed a cage-like frame in which to paint, the struts of which work as rollers, around which she looped a long stretch of canvas. She works within this frame, surrounded on all four sides by the canvas, and applying paint to the rollers and the canvas itself. Pulling the canvas through the frame causes the paint to smear, and then to impress itself on the canvas in repeated but constantly varied patterns, gradually allowing her to build the paintings’ distinctive repetitive layers. The process combines the directness of painting with the indirectness of print-making, and this ambiguity seems to feed through many aspects of the images.
The dynamism of the resulting paintings belies their contrived, if undeniably intriguing, process of making. The paintings stand as independent objects, rich images. Fully realised gestural painting is never just an accretion of actions, but becomes more than the sum of its parts by actively creating a convincing space – or convincing spaces – for gesture to exist in. Painting as a time-based activity becomes a painting, a stilled, permanent image. The assertion of stillness perhaps becomes even more important when, as with Kraus’s, the image vibrates and fluctuates, grows and recedes, and contains within it multiple echoes of itself.
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