Emily KrausThe draw of the moon, 2026

Oil on canvas

Total: 125 1/4 x 225 1/4 in

About the artist

Born from a dynamic interplay between order and intuition, control and surrender, logic and spontaneity, Emily Kraus’s paintings reveal a strange and forceful harmony of form. In response to a confined studio space and inspired by her background in somatic and meditative practices, she built a system that inverts the traditional choreography of painter and medium. Kraus loops raw canvas around four stainless steel struts that function as rollers and anchor the corners of her cube-like apparatus. Moving within this cocoon-like enclosure, she applies paint, pulling the canvas around the structure, which in turn smears, spreads, and unfolds the pigment. Harnessing the idiosyncrasies of her apparatus—part artist’s tool, part mechanical instrument—Kraus calibrates and exploits the fluctuations of chance in a productive, agonistic exchange. The entirety of each painting is revealed to Kraus only once she frees the canvas from her mechanism. While working, she is able to view no more than a narrow section of the composition at a time, which requires her to rely on visual memory much in the way a musician depends on auditory recollection when composing a melody. Consequently, embedded within the paintings are the temporal and kinetic forces of their making. Kraus’s works vibrate with an underlying rhythm, echoed in the steady pulse of vertical lines that structure their surface—akin to a metronome’s unwavering beat—which serves as a counterpoint to the wild, unfettered sprawl of color across the canvas. Stuttering eloquently, her compositions reverberate and continually evolve, evoking the patterns that permeate nature—the markings on a snakeskin, the ripples of waves, or the cadence of one’s breath. Each painting is a meditation on the present moment, weaving layers of time to contain its own history.

About the artist

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