David Zwirner is pleased to present 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.
this body holds swamp stuff thick viscous life-generating Mud
—Diane di Prima, “Show Me Your Other Body”
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. With its vivid and visceral palette of scarlet red, salmon, and bright pink, This iliaster flowers like the wind, serves as a kind of internal landscape, capturing the contours and forms of the inner body—as also suggested by an impression of the artist’s own arms and torso that is visible in white paint at the left edge of the composition. Ghostly imprints of the canvas’s stretcher bars emerge across the painting, nodding subversively to the modernist motif of the grid.
52 Walker