Emily Kraus: In Relation | Luhring Augustine
Emily Kraus’ paintings are striking and distinctive, but your appreciation of them increases once you know how they’re made. Trapped in her studio in lockdown, she came up with a large contraption on which canvases can be stretched and rotated with the artist suspended in the middle.
Several examples are on show currently at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca gallery. The works would be arresting enough by themselves, but they’re enhanced by the display. One painting wraps around a corner. Another is suspended between two pillars. They’re all huge. The results are glitchy and stuttering, strokes of oil paint suggesting pulses and waves. Inside the silent gallery, I felt a kind of mysterious, primal rhythm.
Kraus’ process has apparently stayed the same over the years, even now lockdown is over and gallery exhibitions are a possibility. (She is US-born but works in London.)
The works themselves pay tribute to a tension between the human imagination, and hand, and mechanical motion. It sounds maddening: applying paint, pulling the canvas around its slow square circuite, applying more paint. Thinking some more. Turning again.
But the results are really great.
Emily Kraus: In Relation is at Luhring Augustine (New York City). 11 April - 13 June 2026