Two Rorschach blobs as tall as men—one dark, the other a bright copper and blue—cast lassos at each other. They send out waves of black paint ripples, like motion made visible between them. Because those ripples are mechanically produced, it doesn’t seem quite right to call this work, by the young American artist Emily Kraus, a painting. A production, maybe, or a result?

Each in the other what each has to give (2026) is one of six busy and rhythmic abstractions on view in Kraus’s solo debut at Luhring Augustine. She has perfected her mechanical process: she begins by sewing two ends of a large canvas together, creating a cylinder that is then fitted tightly around the four steel struts of a cage-like apparatus, which she enters through a gangway. She paints the inner walls of the cylinder, and then pulls the edges of the canvas so that fresh fabric scrolls through the struts, and then she paints some more. As she pulls, the struts pick up the wet paint and, like rollers in printmaking, stamp repeating forms along the inner wall of the canvas, over and over, until the pigment disappears or until she applies more.

Kraus, who lives in London, developed the method in art school, when she wanted to make large paintings but was confined to an eight-by-eight-foot studio. Her repetitions can be lovely, as in Hopping Time (2026), in which a fence of tall, tight curls unwinds across the background, fading from a pleasing shade of plum into nothingness. At their best, they create something like a delightful visual equivalent to the sound-on-sound delay on magnetic tape that Sam Phillips applied to Elvis Presley’s voice in “Blue Moon.” But the mechanical origin of these paintings is a knot that she will have to untangle as she grows as an artist. How to make it human?

Unlike her previous work, which involved very little of her own hand atop the stamps, these new paintings suggest that she is already moving in a more interventionist direction: there are splatters and splashes; thick pools of poured paint; dry patches of raw, stained canvas apparently mixed with metallic pigment that sparkles from the side, especially in the high-tide forms dividing Anemoi (2026), a big diptych whose two parts are hung in a corner at a right angle, like a book open for study. The prevalence of slung paint makes the Abstract Expressionists—particularly Jackson Pollock and Janet Sobel, who explored the randomness of the drip from midair—the main references here. Kraus seems to want to suggest that the machine can become a surrogate for the artistic unconscious. Her nearest ancestor might be Harold Cohen, who programmed a computer to paint for him, or the room-size roller printers that mass-produced wallpaper in the nineteenth century.

You can sense Kraus’s own anxiety that the works might be too automated or too decorative. Hopping Time is marred by a white diamond painted between creases created by the struts, to draw attention to the mishap. In another painting those creases speak for themselves through the layers of paint, like a hastily ironed tablecloth, and elsewhere Kraus retraces them with crude Twomblian brushstrokes. The David Hockney–style splash at the center of Burl (2026), which she has added over an incongruous square of blue paint, seems to warn, “I am disrupting the canvas now.”

The least mechanically altered work, The draw of the moon (2026), has been primed in fast-drying water-based vinyl paint. A mountain of green looms on the left (vinyl) side of the canvas, while a tidal wave crashes toward it from the right (oil) side. In the empty middle is a sort of valley of artistic possibility. Knowing about Kraus’s method makes it hard to stop hunting for mechanical imprints as one moves from one canvas to the next, so forms like the mountain and wave can feel compensatory, as if Kraus’s anxiety about humanizing her work dictates her approach to her mediums. I’m not sure that is a bad thing. At the dawn of AI, few ways of painting speak as directly as this to the question of our purpose in a technologically generative future. What answers might she find?