For Emily Kraus, now 31, physical and mental barriers have often served as artistic inspiration. In 2020, she began her MA in Painting at London’s Royal College of Art, at the height of the pandemic. Kraus was confined to a tiny studio, took her classes on Zoom, and wrote her dissertation on the means of transcending boundaries. “I was stretching a canvas around the entire space, holding it in place with shower poles,” she has said. “My paintings are environments. In a way, they record the performance of life.” Kraus’s works on oil build hypnotic, cyclical patterns that reflect the mind in captivity. In her first solo exhibition in New York City, Kraus’s signature large-scale abstract paintings vibrate with rippling vertical lines and seem to reach beyond the walls of the gallery. They demarcate their own boundaries. —Maggie Turner