February 27, 2024 – David Zwirner is pleased to announce the representation of New Zealand–born and Los Angeles–based painter Emma McIntyre in collaboration with Château Shatto. In the fall of 2023, McIntyre’s work was the subject of a celebrated solo presentation, An echo, a stain, at David Zwirner’s 34 East 69th Street location in New York. An exhibition of the artist’s work is planned for David Zwirner’s Hong Kong gallery.
McIntyre creates vivid abstractions imbued with chromatic and gestural energy. Instinctual yet deeply considered, her canvases explore the material and alchemical possibilities of painting. Employing oils and unconventional substances, like resin and oxidized iron, the artist juxtaposes boldly painted strokes, swaths of vibrant color, and hints of figurative imagery in her atmospheric canvases. McIntyre pairs chance-based, intuitive processes with a repertoire of motifs and compositional strategies gleaned from a close study of art history, synthesizing a 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 painting that is uniquely her own.
David Zwirner states, “I saw Emma’s work for the first time in the spring of 2022 at Frieze New York in Château Shatto’s presentation. It may sound a bit corny, but for me it was love at first sight. Emma’s practice manages to fuse the new and the familiar in spectacular fashion. Her mark making and the pictorial intelligence of her compositions are rooted in the history of gestural abstraction, yet she manages to cover, with confidence, entirely new territory. I’m thankful to Liv Barrett for introducing this wonderful young artist to the gallery, and I am excited for our forthcoming solo exhibition with Emma in Hong Kong.”
Olivia Barrett of Château Shatto states, “Artists make work within supportive ecosystems, and our collaboration with David Zwirner and his gallery brings enriched context and heft to the gallery environment underlying Emma McIntyre’s practice. Her painterly formats and gestures are interpolated, dancing and episodic. The historical touchstones of David Zwirner’s program resonate deeply in McIntyre’s work, and the vigor, curiosity, and intelligence that David Zwirner brings to the evolving conditions of contemporary art sit in harmony with the spirit of Emma’s paintings.”
Emma McIntyre was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1990. After graduating from Auckland University of Technology in 2011, she received an MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2016 and a second MFA from the 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.
Recent solo exhibitions of McIntyre’s work include An echo, a stain, David Zwirner, New York (2023); Pearl Diver, Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2023); Madonna of the Pomegranate, Coastal Signs, Auckland (2022); Up bubbles her amorous breath, Air de Paris, Paris (2022); and Heat, Mossman Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2020).
In 2023, work by the artist was included in L’Almanach 23, the fourth edition of the biennial held at Le Consortium, Dijon, France. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
