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.