Emma McIntyre: This body holds / swamp stuff at David Zwirner

New Zealand–born, Los Angeles–based Emma McIntyre has a show of new paintings and works on paper at David Zwirner's Tribeca space, 52 Walker Street, through October 24. Titled after a line from a Diane di Prima poem, This body holds / swamp stuff is her third solo exhibition with the gallery.

McIntyre was born in Auckland in 1990. She graduated from Auckland University of Technology in 2011, earned an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2016, received a Fulbright Graduate Award in 2019, and completed a second MFA at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena in 2021. She is a founding board member of the cooperative gallery Coastal Signs in Auckland. Her work appeared in L'Almanach 23 at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2023, and she has previously shown at David Zwirner in New York (2023) and Hong Kong (2025).

Everything on view was made in 2026, and material is the point of departure. McIntyre works with oils and with unconventional substances such as oxidized iron and copper, pouring, pressing, and layering them across the canvas. In Solve et coagula, an oxidizing agent poured over iron-based paint on a gray ground produces rust-orange blooms; the artist has said she was thinking of Sigmar Polke and liked that the rust keeps changing beyond her intervention. Beautiful old lies introduces oxidized copper paint, which yields an azure field recalling Giotto's lapis lazuli skies in the Scrovegni Chapel. Cobalt blue is painted over it, and at the center sits a semiabstract mark taken from an angel's wing in Giotto's The Dream of Joachim.

Other surfaces carry the traces of improvised tools: honeycomb grids from bubble wrap pressed into wet paint, rings of stain from a spray bottle, and imprints of the artist's own arms and torso. The two-panel Violet for the temple veil, about 3.8 meters wide, was made by pouring inky blue-black paint onto separate white and gray panels and then joining them, so the finished work reads like a Rorschach blot or an open book. Crackle and drag pours white over a ground of bone black, a chalky pigment made from charred bones, and rubs the center back to bare canvas.

McIntyre works at two scales. Small canvases, some only around 12 by 14 inches, are where she tests colors, motifs, and layering that later appear in large paintings, and the reverse also happens. Works on paper, combining oil stick scrawls with pigmented washes, begin from paints mixed for earlier canvases and sometimes carry impressions of her palette, serving as both a start and an end point in her cycle of making.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM.