Kitty Kraus

September 26 – November 29, 2026
Opening: Friday, September 25, 19:00

Kitty Kraus’s exhibition at Kunstverein München is dedicated to a single new work: a path that seems to have no end. A mirror, lit from behind, casts a long black shadow across the floor. For that shadow to resolve into a perfectly straight line, and for the line to continue as a path, the light has to behave in a way that artificial light normally does not.

Sunlight can achieve this effortlessly, its rays reaching the earth in near-parallel lines. A lamp has no such distance to work with: positioned close to what it illuminates, the rays fan out from a single point so that, instead of running straight, the shadow cast diverges. Kraus works against this condition using a tightly focused light source of almost blinding intensity and an arrangement of mirrors. The light is bent and redirected, coaxing artificial light to behave like sunlight. What results is elementary: a long, straight black line across the floor.

But the line does not end where the shadow ends. It continues inside the mirror, in its own reflection, appearing to continue far beyond its actual length. What reads as a single uninterrupted form therefore exists in two different states: partly as a shadow on the floor, partly as its reflection in the mirror. Neither has substance, yet together they give the line its apparent continuity. It is entirely there, yet at the same time much of what we see is not. What begins as an optical problem becomes a question of presence: how something immaterial can acquire the precision and insistence of an object.

Kraus often places minimal means under extreme physical tension. In other works, materials are pushed to the point where they are about to burst, melt, hit, crack, or break apart, held at the threshold between one state and another. Yet these transformations never become spectacle; they remain bound to the properties, pressures, and limits of the materials themselves. In this new work, that boundary is held exactly in place, always close to slipping out of alignment. 

Kraus’s economy of minimal means is pushed to its limit here. Light, a mirror, a shadow: the work is reduced to these elements that are at once physically exact, yet difficult to locate as things. Light passes through space; a mirror holds what is elsewhere; a shadow has no substance yet registers with the exactitude of a drawn line. Kraus brings these conditions into deft relation, so that the apparently simple arrangement begins to slip between presence and image, between what is physically there and what only seems to be.

The exhibition is realized in collaboration with Simian, Copenhagen, and is made possible with the generous support of Knackscharf Rent.