Dylan Solomon Kraus The Joys of Sacrifice

Almine Rech New York, Upper East Side is pleased to present 'The Joys of Sacrifice,' Dylan Solomon Kraus's second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from January 22 to March 14, 2026.

Consider that a sparrow might also be an agglomeration of shapes. At first, it might not be the most appealing idea. Sparrows, after all, are living things. As such, they enjoy a right not to be reduced to the sum of their parts. Alone the bird’s physical neural vastness provides a sufficient disincentive, to thinking of it as some kind of living, breathing, flying geometric puzzle. So you’d be justified to refuse the suggestion, to think the bird in this way. Unless you’d been paying attention to Dylan Solomon Kraus’s paintings of the last fifteen years. 

In this body of work, there is a small canvas depicting a bird, perched on an outstretched branch, against a night sky. Two lines signal the bird’s breakdown into form. Both begin where the creature’s back meets its neck. Both then drop down, swooping away from one another. From there, they describe the divisions between neck and breast, torso and wing. The bird flits towards naturalism. But its movement in that direction is curtailed by a stylistic gambit, which transforms the richness of feather into something smoother, like porcelain. In turn, transitions from shadow to light resemble dispersions of dust.

The painting, like all of Kraus’s work, games natural vision. Seeing, these pictures remind us, is always an act of interpretation. The actors in this process are the rods, cones, and ganglia of the retina and optic nerve. Together they carve forms from a splendour of in-flooding light signals. The fact that we see birds as we see them – and that we agree on seeing them so – is so contingent on those biological calculations, as to verge on dumb chance. In Kraus’s paintings, these games carry into visual conundrums, or riddles. Some concern the source of colour itself. Let’s look again at that sparrow. It’s bright blue. Not the blue of bluebirds, with their sandy breasts, but blue-all-over. As in many of the paintings, the impression is both of moonlight reflected in snow, and a permanently blue world. 

— A full press release by Mitch Speed will follow.