"The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Emily Kraus" by Gabrielle Schwarz

"Watch your head,” said painter Emily Kraus. The young American artist was showing me around the large structure that fills her studio space in East London—a metal scaffold fitted with a series of planks and rotating poles on which multiple canvases are stretched. This is how Kraus makes her paintings: First, she stitches each canvas into a loop, then she wraps it around four poles, forming a kind of square tube, before applying marks in oil paint to its surface. Next, she pulls the canvas around the poles while the paint is still wet, so that her gestures are replicated over and over again, like a glitch on a printer, gradually petering out. Once the paint has dried, she repeats the procedure, adding new layers.

Eventually, Kraus removes the canvas from the scaffold, unstitches it, and takes it to the other studio, which she calls her “clean room,” where she can properly examine the results for the first time. (The whole thing takes about a month from beginning to end.) The images are, of course, abstract—although sometimes certain forms seem to emerge from the multihued striations: a row of marching soldiers, for instance, or a dark winged creature.

Kraus started making work in this idiosyncratic way three years ago, while she was studying for her master’s in the prestigious painting program at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. The first version of the mechanism, she pointed out to me, was nowhere near this elaborate: “It was shower poles and wooden brackets attached to the wall.” It was also much smaller, designed to fit the 8-by-8-foot studio she had been allocated. But since then, a spurt of opportunities have allowed her to scale up. She was nominated for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2023 and has received solo and group shows at galleries including The Sunday Painter in London, Kadel Willborn in Düsseldorf, Fondazione Bonollo in Vicenza, and Luhring Augustine in New York. “I’ve been incredibly fortunate that my ambition for the work and what I want to do with it has coincided with my ability to actually grow the practice,” said Kraus when reflecting on this recent busy period, “and that’s such a rare thing for an artist to encounter.”

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