Artist to Watch: This London Talent Creates Hypnotic, Large-Scale Works Using a Custom Scaffold Fit for an Acrobat

An impressive structure that is part jungle gym, part feat of precision engineering dominates the East London studio of artist Emily Kraus. It’s a setup that enables her to stretch her canvas over four poles to form a tube with a platform in the middle from which she works, spinning the composition by hand to make patterns with the paint.

The process “came out of working in small spaces,” says Kraus, a native New Yorker, who first moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art. “I had an eight-foot cube as my studio,” she recalls. “I was stretching canvas around the entire space, holding it in place with shower poles. I’d paint, and then I’d take a nap on it. My paintings are environments. In a way, they record the performance of life.”

Oil paint is applied via syringe, palette knife, and other means, then dragged across the surface. Multiple layers of marks build into abstract creations that are lyrical and rhythmic, simultaneously regimented and expressive. When the canvas is removed from its scaffolding, its evolution from tunnellike structure to vast open plain “reflects the expansiveness of the mind in captivity,” says Kraus, who draws inspiration from her studies in religion at Kenyon College in Ohio as well as her yoga and meditation practices.

The results have been making waves. In 2024, her output was the subject of five solo presentations, including a Frieze London booth with the Sunday Painter gallery and exhibitions at Fondazione Bonollo in Vicenza, Italy, and Galería Mascota in Mexico City. Last year, by contrast, she chose to show only one new work: Infatuation, a 31-foot-wide painting that extended across two walls, at Art Basel in Miami Beach with Luhring Augustine. “It can’t just be an exhaustive churning-out process,” says Kraus.

The period of reflection will culminate in her first New York solo exhibition, debuting April 10, at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca gallery. New experiments include stitching segments of canvas closed, then opening them up “like an exquisite corpse or more like a Frankenstein,” but her overarching production method remains the same. “Working with such a rigid structure is important to me because I’m not naturally rigid at all,” she says. “I think too many things at the same time, so this is literally a cage for my mind.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Spring Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.