"Emily Kraus’s Glitchy Paintings Challenge Aesthetic Authority" by Maddie Hampton

Emily Kraus’s paintings pulse with an undeniable freshness, trading in that peculiar and all-too-rare genre of association: vaguely familiar despite being utterly implacable. The works are evocative of a music score, the wavering line of an electrocardiogram or even the symmetrical flurries of motion that defined so much of Italian futurism. Yet they reject the neatness of any single aesthetic forebear. Instead, between vibrating lines and interrupted repetitions, Kraus’s looping compositions betray the myriad contradictions that propel life onwards, dialectics best framed as a recurring negotiation between structure and surrender.

In this way, the works reveal something of their own making. Kraus paints with a self-engineered apparatus comprising a large rectangular frame constructed from four metal rods, around which she wraps the canvas. Dotting the cloth with paint by hand and with a palette knife, she manipulates it across the bars to achieve her unique, rhythmic patterning. It is a fundamentally technical process: an experiment in imagery situated somewhere between the planned and the spontaneous, where the artist’s hand is present but necessarily filtered through its reliance on the mechanical tools of production. Kraus first began working with the apparatus while a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art in London; confined to her small studio space at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was forced to devise novel methods for painting at scale. Building on her ‘Stochastic’ series (2022–ongoing), the paintings installed in ‘In Relation’ at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca gallery are hung to establish sight lines that allude to a kind of continuation, a spectre reinforced by the seeming borderlessness of the individual compositions, so that the exhibition morphs into a single, unified architecture.

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