Frieze London with The Sunday Painter
2024
For this year's edition of Frieze London, The Sunday Painter presents a solo booth by Emily Kraus with the work Agon (Waveform), 2024.
'To capture time in an image calls to mind the speed, directionality, and focal point of our perceived reality. Emily Kraus’ paintings propose the coexistence of linear and cyclical temporalities. Informed by meditative, yogic, and somatic practices, her creative process oscillates between spontaneous mark-making and periods of meditative reflection. Kraus’ paintings vibrate with an underlying rhythm, echoed in the steady cadence of vertical lines that structure the space—akin to a metronome’s unwavering beat. The orderly foundation serves as a counterpoint to the wild, unfettered sprawl of colour across the canvas. In this dynamic interplay, the works come alive with the energy of their genesis: expanding and contracting, they contain multiple echoes of their own creation.
Kraus’ Agon paintings display a strange harmony of form. This forceful, agonistic balance is echoed in her relationship with her mechanism during the creative process: a delicate interplay of structure and intuition, control and surrender. In navigating this tension, Kraus cannot fully submit to either, as it is within this balance that the organic essence of her work is realised.'