The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Emily Kraus
“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.”
The journey to this point wasn’t a direct one. As a child, growing up in New York, Kraus had always liked drawing, but she didn’t consider art as a career. She enrolled at Kenyon College, a liberal arts school in Ohio, where she majored in religious studies. “I wasn’t raised with religion, but from a very young age, I had this question about the meaning of life—you know, what’s the point?” she explained. “I would use it as an excuse to not do my homework, which is a very teenage thing to say, but I started when I was, like, seven.”
Emily Kraus, installation view of “Nest Time” at The Sunday Painter, 2023. Photo by Ollie Hammick. Courtesy of the artist and The Sunday Painter.
During college, having decided to focus on Southeast Asian religions, Kraus spent her third year in India, including a few months in a monastery where she developed a strong meditation practice. But she soon realized she wasn’t going to find satisfactory answers in what anybody else had thought of: “I can’t do what people tell me to do. I have to come up with it for myself.” Back in the U.S., she undertook a summer program at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, where she was given a space to simply play around with materials. It unlocked something. Making art, Kraus realized, was what gave her life meaning.
For a few years, Kraus then worked for Factum Arte, a technologically advanced art production company, in Madrid. “That was an amazing education,” she said, “because I learned how to work with many different materials—and that anything is achievable, you just need to find the right source of information.” When she arrived in London to begin her master’s, it was the middle of COVID. The first few months of the course were conducted on Zoom. Inspired by these circumstances, she started writing a dissertation exploring the idea of confinement and how to transcend it, thinking about different kinds of boundaries: the walls of a room, the skin of your body, the country you live in.
Emily Kraus, Nest Time 3, 2023. Photo by Ollie Hammick. Courtesy of the artist and The Sunday Painter.
Portrait of Emily Kraus in her studio, 2024. Photo by Hannah Burton for Artsy.
Once the students were allowed into the RCA building, she made good use of the space; one series involved her painting on the ceiling and allowing marks to drip onto the floor. But then in her second year, she was given her new studio: a tiny cube in a repurposed photography building. That’s when she got to work building the first version of the mechanism that she still uses today.
Looking back, Kraus can see how her different experiences led to the work she makes now. It was in Buddhism and Hinduism that she encountered “a more cyclical understanding of time” as opposed to the linear chronologies of Western thought: This is reflected, she suggests, in the rotations of her looped canvases. And there is a clear link between her writing on escaping confinement and the structure she built, which allowed her to paint on a wider surface area than would have otherwise been possible. But there are other ideas that this semi-mechanized system allows her to express as well, including what she describes as “the duality between structure and organic nature.”
In each piece, Kraus’s own painterly gestures are transformed by the mechanism in ways both expected and unexpected. Early on, for instance, she discovered that the canvas would often wrinkle, and create blank tracks running horizontally across the paintings. She now throws out any canvases where they don’t appear. She also never goes back in and alters a painting after unstitching it. The titles she gives her series reflect this process: “Stochastic” (a mathematical expression referring to a system with random probability), “Agon” (Greek for a competitive struggle between two forces), “After” (the art historical term for a copy of an earlier work).
Kraus stressed to me that she doesn’t think people need to know exactly how she makes her paintings in order for them to communicate something. “I think work is effective when it lives on its own,” she said. Everyone is welcome to find their own meanings and metaphors. But she was interested to observe that anyone with a vaguely musical background always seemed to recognize in the paintings a kind of notation system or score. In response, she has been planning a project in Milan, where she will invite composers to come and look at her canvases, then translate the visual marks into a musical “language” for paintings.
Portrait of Emily Kraus in her studio, 2024. Photo by Hannah Burton for Artsy.
It’s clear, then, that the system she built in that tiny studio three years ago is still yielding fresh ideas and material. “To me, the moment I’m not making discoveries through making the work, I won’t make the work like this anymore,” Kraus said. “But I am making those discoveries continually.”
The Artsy Vanguard 2025
The Artsy Vanguard is our annual feature highlighting the most promising artists working today. The seventh edition of The Artsy Vanguard features 10 exceptional talents poised to become the next great leaders of contemporary art. Explore more of The Artsy Vanguard 2025 and browse works by the artists.
Header: Portrait of Emily Kraus in her studio, 2024. Photo by Hannah Burton for Artsy
