The Sunday Painter is pleased to present a new body of work by Emily Kraus, produced specifically for Frieze London 2024.
To capture time in an image calls to mind the speed, directionality, and focal point of our perceived reality. Emily Kraus’ paintings propose the coexistence of linear and cyclical temporalities. Informed by meditative, yogic, and somatic practices, her creative process oscillates between spontaneous mark-making and periods of meditative reflection. Kraus’ paintings vibrate with an underlying rhythm, echoed in the steady cadence of vertical lines that structure the space—akin to a metronome's unwavering beat. The orderly foundation serves as a counterpoint to the wild, unfettered sprawl of colour across the canvas. In this dynamic interplay, the works come alive with the energy of their genesis: expanding and contracting, they contain multiple echoes of their own creation.
The artist developed her unique process in response to a confined studio space at the Royal College of Art in London while exploring themes around action, containment, meditation and freedom. She engineered a cube-like structure using struts that function as rollers, around which she looped raw canvas. As she applies paint by hand and pulls the canvas around the constructed room, the structure smears, spreads, and unfolds the paint, forming patterns that repeat but continually evolve. Over time and many layers, Kraus builds meaning through her mark-making which often exhibits organic qualities resembling the repetitive–yet never quite identical–motifs found in nature. This pattern-like iconography recalls the sinuous texture of snakeskin, a network of veins, or the fluctuations of an electrocardiogram as it records the electrical signals of a heartbeat. From afar, one might even recognise the warping frequencies and rhythms of a musical score. The structure simultaneously functions as a habitation for the artist while she works and the tool for application of paint. To create an organic image within a rigid system requires listening, attention and choreography of movement.
Kraus once referred to her work as 'stochastic' because of the seemingly random distributions in her process. Recently, she has reached a pivotal juncture in her practice in which she channels her understanding of these unpredictable elements to shape more deliberate movements within the work. She has titled this resulting subject driven work, Agon, after the Ancient Greek word referring to a contest oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but emphasising the importance of the struggle itself—a struggle which cannot exist without the opponent. Stravinsky and Balanchine’s homonymous ballet of 1957 lays the groundwork for the lineage of agon in contemporary art.
Kraus’ Agon paintings display a strange harmony of form. This forceful, agonistic balance is echoed in her relationship with her mechanism during the creative process: a delicate interplay of structure and intuition, control and surrender. In navigating this tension, Kraus cannot fully submit to either, as it is within this balance that the organic essence of her work is realised.
Emily Kraus (b. 1995) received her Painting MA from the Royal College of Art in London (2022) and a BA in Religious Studies from Kenyon College (2017). Select solo exhibitions include: Luhring Augustine, New York (*forthcoming, 2025); Dare Tempo Al Tempo, Matta, Milan, Italy, 2024; 444 Days, Fondazione Bonollo, Thiene, Italy, 2024; Ouroboros, Galería Mascota, Mexico City, Mexico 2024; A man and a woman and a blackbird, Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway, 2024 and Nest Time, The Sunday Painter, London, UK, 2023. Select group exhibitions include: VERTIGO, Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles Island, 2025; Patterns, Luhring Augustine, New York, USA, 2024; Double Take, LVH, London, UK, 2024; Painting As It Were (Painting As Is III), Kadel Willborn, Dusseldorf, Germany, 2024; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Camden Arts Center, London, 2024; Nine Rules of Tremulation, Noname, Paris, 2024; Echoes Across Surfaces, Duarte Sequeira HQ, Braga, Portugal, 2023; The Amber Room, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2023 and My Mother was a Computer, Indigo+Madder, London, UK 2022. In 2023, Kraus won the Hopper Prize and was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize.