‘Emma McIntyre | A Sometimes Unresolved Threading,’ by Maddie Klett
2023
“It was impossible not to think about the context of New York when I was making this show,” Los Angeles–based, New Zealand–born painter Emma McIntyre says about her solo exhibition, An echo, a stain, recently on view at David Zwirner. The gallery is blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick, and other storied cultural institutions, and this proximity to works by Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and the Met’s Manet/Degas blockbuster weighed on how she approached making new work.
A committed abstractionist, these Rococo influences are not immediately apparent in the drippy swaths of paint, rust, and diamond dust that cover her canvases. Still, McIntyre’s work makes the argument that a painting can be transportative, even escapist, by means of a coupling of colors or break of gradient. It is the shared journey painters have with their materials, and the enduring pull between figuration and abstraction, that drives her affinity for 19th and 20th-century predecessors.
McIntyre’s paintings often start with pours of oil paint mixed with thinner over a horizontal canvas. “I can move the canvas around,” McIntyre explains, “but really the paint does its own thing. The material effects and chemical reactions are something I can never predict. I don’t use a formula for how I mix things, so it ends up different every time.” A number of works contain oxidized iron that forms after she applies an oxidizing solution to iron-based paint. While the rusting occurs almost instantly, the tonality of the substance—like the blue edges of the blotchy forms in the large-scale Duets in the dust (2023)—becomes more vibrant over time. That state of incompleteness excites her. As the Zwirner exhibition ends and the paintings travel to collections in various locales, their surfaces will reflect these shifts. Those futures are at the front of McIntyre’s mind: “Wherever they go I imagined that they continue to change.”
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