Emma McIntyre: This body holds / swamp stuff

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.

In Solve et coagula, a gray-ground painting, McIntyre pours an oxidizing agent over iron-based paint, creating vibrant rust-orange blooms that spread across the composition.

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.

The ivory-white background of Those muted those rain tones features a subtle circular pattern made by pressing bubble wrap onto the canvas. McIntyre then poured various hues of green and blue across the painting, reveling in the distinct physical transformations—such as cracking, staining, and shifts in hue—that arise as two pigments interact on the surface of the work. Traversing the bottom half of the painting is a scriptlike scrawl, also seen in the artist’s contemporaneous works on paper, that attenuates McIntyre’s recurring peony motif into a graphic motif reminiscent of Twombly’s linework.

McIntyre works at two scales, creating vast paintings as well as intimate works. The small canvases are sites of experimentation for the artist, where she tests new color combinations, motifs, or ways of layering paint. Symbols and gestures discovered at a smaller scale materialize in her larger paintings, and vice versa, enacting a feedback loop and creating harmony across the two poles. The dense, built-up surfaces of the smaller works find synchrony with the sprawling compositions that feature multiple visual climaxes.

Throughout the exhibition, exuberant brushwork collides with unexpected geometries: rings of stained pigment are formed from the close application of a spray bottle. In Bright medusas, gridded honeycomb patterns arise from panels of bubble wrap placed directly on paint, and in other works, prints of the artist’s own body float and blend with organic pools of color.

Crackle and drag features a palette that leans toward the monochrome. To make this work, McIntyre poured a wash of white paint atop a ground of bone black, a natural pigment made with charred animal bones that is notable for its chalky finish. She then partially rubbed away the black paint at the center of the work to reveal bare canvas underneath—furthering her experiments with the layering and handling of paint to create effects of opacity, transparency, and luminosity.

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.