NEW YORK, NY.- David Zwirner opened an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by New Zealand–born and Los Angeles–based artist Emma McIntyre at the gallery’s Tribeca location in New York. Titled after a line from a poem by Diane di Prima, This body holds / swamp stuff is McIntyre’s third solo show with the gallery.
Thrumming with gestural and somatic energy, McIntyre’s abstractions probe the alchemical possibilities of the painted medium. The artist initiates a call and response between her hand and her materials, which include oils as well as unconventional substances such as oxidized iron and copper. McIntyre pours, impresses, and combines these pigments across the canvas, creating atmospheric and multilayered paintings that revel in a state of flux; slipping between order and chaos, spontaneity and deliberation, their surfaces shift constantly as she works—and as the viewer beholds them.
The works on view, all made in 2026, present material as a central point of interest. In one gray-ground painting, McIntyre pours an oxidizing agent over iron-based paint, creating vibrant rust-orange blooms that spread across the composition. Other works, such as Beautiful old lies, feature oxidized copper paint of a striking azure hue—conjuring associations with Giotto’s use of coveted lapis lazuli pigment to depict the heavenly sky in his fourteenth-century Scrovegni Chapel frescoes in Padua, Italy. This painting also features a semiabstract mark directly based on an angel’s wing seen in one of Giotto’s frescoes, and similar enigmatic images arise elsewhere in the exhibition. Rendered in a crisp and contrastingly realist style, McIntyre’s excerpted wings alight delicately on canvas like birds caught in a moment of transformation.
Colors and motifs echo between diverse compositions throughout the show, establishing an overarching poetic rhythm that ebbs and flows in a manner akin to Earth’s shifting seasons and weather systems. McIntyre’s works on paper exemplify the inherently rhizomatic nature of her practice; each composition shares roots with the ones made before and after it, enacting a process of generation and discovery. Featuring gestural oil stick scrawls juxtaposed with pigmented washes, these compositions catalyze ideas for McIntyre’s paintings. At the same time, the works on paper often begin from paints the artist has mixed for previous canvases—and sometimes even feature physical impressions of her palette—thus situating the works as both a beginning and an end to her cyclical creative process.
Throughout the exhibition, exuberant brushwork collides with unexpected geometries: rings of stained pigment are formed from the close application of a spray bottle, gridded honeycomb patterns arise from panels of bubble wrap placed directly on paint, and prints of the artist’s own body float and blend with organic pools of color. Many of the large-scale paintings on view feature palettes that lean toward the monochrome. In the diptych Violet for the temple veil, McIntyre separately poured inky blue-black paints onto each white and gray panel, before joining them into a finished work resembling a Rorschach test or the pages of a book. Other paintings display an inverse visual construction; Crackle and drag features a wash of white paint poured atop a ground of bone black—a natural pigment made with charred animal bones, notable for its chalky finish—furthering McIntyre’s experiments with the layering of paint to create effects of opacity, transparency, and luminosity.
Emma McIntyre (b. 1990) was born in Auckland, New Zealand. After graduating from Auckland University of Technology in 2011, she received an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2016 and a second MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, in 2021. In 2019 she received a Fulbright Graduate Award. McIntyre is a founding board member of the cooperative gallery Coastal Signs, Auckland.
Recent solo exhibitions of McIntyre’s work include Aragonite and conchiolin, Chteau Shatto, Los Angeles (2026); Syllables in Oleander, Air de Paris, Paris (2025); Objects or Vapours, Coastal Signs, Auckland (2024); Pearl Diver, Chteau Shatto, Los Angeles (2023); Madonna of the Pomegranate, Coastal Signs, Auckland (2022); Up bubbles her amorous breath, Air de Paris, Paris (2022); and Heat, Mossman Gallery, Wellington (2020).
In 2023, work by the artist was included in L’Almanach 23, the fourth edition of the biennial held at Le Consortium, Dijon, France.
An echo, a stain, a solo exhibition of McIntyre’s work, was held at David Zwirner New York in 2023. In 2025, the solo exhibition Among my swan was presented at David Zwirner Hong Kong. McIntyre lives and works in Los Angeles.
