Emily Kraus: Nest Time @ The Sunday Painter

Nest Time is Emily Kraus’ first solo show at The Sunday Painter. The exhibition features the new body of work of the artist, who, after showcasing her first collection of stochastic paintings, has clearly evolved her creative practice into something wholly unique and authentic to her artistic identity.

Large-scale paintings dominate the walls of the gallery, offering an immersive experience for the viewer. Upon entering the exhibition, the initial feeling that greets the viewer is a desire to comprehend how these pieces were created.

The Sunday Painter installation view.

Left: Stochastic 17, 2023 Oil on canvas, 170 x 300 cm

Right: Stochastic 10, 2023 Oil on canvas, 170 x 300 cm

Courtesy of The Sunday Painter.

Although the paintings bear similar syncopated, pulsating forms, each possesses a unique character and, more importantly, communicates a different distinctive emotion. As a result, it’s challenging to think of how they have been made and how the artist conceived their nature. Emily's practice arose out of necessity but evolved in response to the nature of contingency. In reaction to a very small room she was assigned to during college, she started thinking of a way to arrange the tiny space to be free to move and work spontaneously.

Thanks to her creative proactivity, the small room she was assigned to turned out to be a strength rather than a weakness. That’s where she invented a machine that could allow her to approach the canvas uniquely. Instead of acting manually on it with paint and brushes, she built a cubic structure where she arranged a canvas loop. Once the canvas starts rotating on the loop, the quantity of paint instantly occupies the material. As a result, it expands naturally, giving life to rhythmic vibrations of colour that assume the shape of magnetic waves and fluctuations.

Emily Kraus and the cubic structure.

Courtesy of The Sunday Painter.

Emily’s cubic invention was not only a result of a problem-solving process adopted by the artist but became the beginning of a promising career, a ‘nest’ from which the life of innovative creations and interesting concepts took place. While surrounded by the structure she built, the artist could assist the memorable encounter of paint with the canvas. Immersed in her ‘nest’, Emily participates in the mechanism, being the mediator between the two materials, the coordinator of an extraordinary and possibly infinite relationship. The resulting piece is a specific combination of colours and forms that the artist could only assume, not definitively impose.

The loop moves, allowing the paint and the canvas to converge in unison and vibrate together. They produce movement, a conversation that lasts until the artist stops the mechanism that, otherwise, would constantly continue. 

Emily Kraus inside the cubic structure.

Courtesy of The Sunday Painter.

That is why time and space play the leading roles in the entire procedure. Without Emily’s intervention, the canvas would not endlessly rotate, and the exciting effect of the paint being constantly sparged on it would be lost. New realities governed by their intrinsic formulas are conceived by the mechanism to which the artist doesn’t donate only the initial and final input. Instead, she imagines the final results while manually handling the machine, placing interruptions and taking new paths, which will go on to compose the paintings, giving each of them an authentic character.

Emily's practice is self-fulfilling without concealing the artist's creativity, instead embodying it. Thus, Emily founds a new artistic procedure, getting inspiration from the surprising character of events and the cyclic nature of life. She connects her ideal with the technical mechanism producing a natural cycle that continues simultaneously with the artist's mental configuration.

Nevertheless, Emily is outside and inside the creative process simultaneously. This unique and distinctive practice allows her to witness her work simultaneously as both maker and viewer, permitting her to be surprised by the eventuality of creation, to marvel at how the paint has spread out on the canvas as its cyclical nature has decided.

As a viewer, one can share the artist's astonishment at the impressive outcome of her work. We can only imagine what it would be like to be a part of that ‘nest’, where the abstract merges with the beauty of art and where mathematics and the carnal power of inspiration meet.

The Sunday Painter installation view.

Left: Nest Time 1, 2023 Oil on canvas 380 x 280 cm

Centre: Nest Time 2, 2023 Oil on canvas 380 x 280 cm

Right: Nest Time 3, 2023 Oil on canvas 380 x 280 cm

Courtesy of The Sunday Painter.

The stochastic aspect of Emily’s work allows her to unify the aesthetic of her creations to the conceptual dimension that constitutes and originates them. The same tonalities and hues sweep the canvases in Nest Time 1,2,3, exemplifying an identical practice with various outcomes. The itinerary generated by the paint fluctuations appears to begin and end in each of the three paintings as if they are all part of the same cycle. Paint trails and colour combinations move freely on the canvas, creating compositions reminiscent of digital oscillations tracking a patient’s heartbeat. Although not the artist’s intention, this quality adds to the paintings pulsating and sporadic forms.

Contemplating each work, one can think about all the infinite combinations that could have occurred and all the different ways the painting would appear. Furthermore, consider what would have happened to each artwork if the machine had functioned otherwise, had probability dealt its cards differently, or had Emily intervened in the opposite direction.

Stochastic 12 (diptych), 2023 Oil on canvas, 170 x 600 cm.

Courtesy of The Sunday Painter.

Another strong component of the show is the centrality given to each work of art. They are protagonists of the gallery environment and evocative of a very personal and original practice. In their multiplicity, the paintings instinctively reconnect to their common origins, to their ‘nest’. Thanks to their commonalities, they recall the nature of the creative process as an immeasurable event that produced them.

Emily's works combine a probability calculation with the artist's imagination and sensations. Thus, they allow her to place a new and distinctive practice inside a tradition in which the concept rarely coincides with the aesthetic value of beauty. Step by step, this could be the ‘nest’ from which other innumerable experiments and inventions could impressively arise and new conceptual directions can be taken.

Emily Kraus: Nest Time is on display at The Sunday Painter until June 10, 2023.

Carolina Lorenzini

Reviews Co-Editor, MADE IN BED