Emma McIntyre

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by New Zealand–born and Los Angeles–based artist Emma McIntyre (b. 1990) at the gallery’s Tribeca location in New York. Thrumming with color and gestural energy, McIntyre’s abstractions explore 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. She pours and combines these pigments across the canvas, creating atmospheric and multilayered works that revel in a state of flux; slipping between order and chaos, spontaneity and deliberation, their surfaces constantly shift as the artist works, and as the viewer beholds them. Further broadening her experimentations with medium, scale, and hue, this will be McIntyre’s third solo show with the gallery, following An echo, a stain in New York in 2023 and Among my swan in Hong Kong in 2025.

About the artist

Emma McIntyre (b. 1990) creates vivid abstractions imbued with chromatic and gestural energy. Instinctual yet deeply considered, her canvases explore painting’s material and alchemical possibilities. Employing oils and unconventional substances, she pairs chance-based, intuitive processes with a repertoire of motifs and compositional strategies gleaned from a close study of art history—reformulating these divergent threads into a fresh and unbridled mode of painting that is uniquely her own.

McIntyre 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.