Online Exhibition
Emma McIntyre: Jupiter and Io
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Emma McIntyre, Jupiter and Io, 2025 (detail)
The exterior of the print shop at Farrington Press, with whom McIntyre has collaborated since 2024, in Joshua Tree, California. Photo by Maggie Azary
Antonio Allegri da Correggio, Jupiter and Io, 1520–1540 (detail)
“The title references Correggio’s painting Jupiter and Io, which was inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I find Correggio’s treatment of form in this painting very interesting, especially as Jupiter takes the form of a billowing, atmospheric cloud to embrace the nymph Io. The sensuality of the painting appeals to me, as does the idea of transformation that permeates it.”
—Emma McIntyre
McIntyre works on Jupiter and Io outside the studio, which is positioned at the base of an observatory from the 1970s refurbished by printer Kyle Simon. Photo by Maggie Azary
McIntyre is known for her vivid abstractions imbued with chromatic and gestural energy. Working with oils and unconventional materials like oxidized iron, she explores the alchemical possibilities of the painted medium while expanding traditional understandings of landscape and the natural world.
Jupiter and Io, the artist’s first edition, is a five-plate etching that translates her painterly approach into print. Using techniques like spit bite and sugar lift aquatint, McIntyre builds an atmospheric, allover background layered with unexpected textures—a circular imprint from bubble wrap and the soft outline of a peony, one of her signature motifs, drawn in conté crayon.
Smoke from the open flame of a burning pinyon pine cone is used to strengthen the effects of the soft-ground etching and blackens the plate with soot, allowing the artist to see the results more clearly as she works.
“I was able to let chemistry and chance rule the process, then assess the results and go back in to add and change elements, adding or intervening in each plate until the sum of the parts formed an image—a process unexpectedly resonant with my studio practice.”
—Emma McInytre
Emma McIntyre, Jupiter and Io, 2025 (detail)
Emma McIntyre, Jupiter and Io, 2025
McIntyre pairs her extemporaneous modes of creation with a repertoire of motifs and compositional strategies gleaned from a close study of art history, synthesizing a remarkable range of impulses and motifs—from the aesthetic sensibilities of Renaissance and rococo artists such as Piero della Francesca and Jean-Antoine Watteau to the formal techniques, conceptual structures, and iconography of twentieth-century painters including Helen Frankenthaler, Sigmar Polke, and Cy Twombly—and reformulating these divergent threads into a fresh and unbridled mode of working that is entirely her own.
Photo by Maggie Azary
McIntyre experimented with conté crayon directly on a monotype plate before incorporating its soft, textural lines into the soft-ground etching.
Photo by Maggie Azary
“Correggio’s sensual transformations resonate with my own interest in intersecting forms—gaseous, fluid, solid, and so forth—that entwine in the edition. And the reference to the celestial seems appropriate, having created the edition in proximity to Farrington observatory.”
—Emma McIntyre
Each print is signed and numbered by the artist.
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