David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Aotearoa 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 oxidised 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 (2026), 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 (2026), a grey-ground painting, McIntyre pours an oxidising agent over iron-based paint, creating vibrant rust-orange blooms that spread across the composition.

“I was thinking about Polke and where autonomy lies between the painter and the painting. I liked the idea that the rust would continue to change beyond my intervention.” —Emma McIntyre.

Beautiful old lies (2026) introduces a new material in McIntyre’s expansive practice: oxidised copper paint, which produces a striking azure hue across the entire composition, conjuring associations with early Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone’s use of coveted lapis lazuli pigment to depict the heavenly sky in his 14th-century Scrovegni Chapel frescoes in Padua. Following this layer of oxidised copper paint, McIntyre painted atop the surface with cobalt blue, mining the subtle interplay of texture and hue—the cobalt leaning powdery and purplish, and the copper oxide more stainlike and green-toned—that arises between these two pigments.

At the centre of the work is a semiabstract mark that McIntyre excerpted from an angel’s wing in the Scrovegni Chapel fresco known as The Dream of Joachim (c.1305). Rendered in a crisp and contrastingly realist style, this enigmatic feathered form alights delicately on the canvas like a bird caught in a moment of transformation.

“I love how I can rush myself—and hopefully the viewer—through time by creating a chain of references that might move from a Greek myth straight to the present day.” —Emma McIntyre.

The ivory-white background of Those muted those rain tones (2026) 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 Cy 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 (2026), 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.

Pearls of ambergris (2026) exemplifies McIntyre’s central interest in materiality. To make this work, she poured an oxidising agent over iron-based paint, creating vibrant rust-orange blooms that spread across the composition. While the paint was still wet and in the midst of this chemical transformation, McIntyre covered the entire canvas in plastic bubble wrap, resulting in a highly textural honeycomb pattern.

Crackle and drag (2026) 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 centre 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.

“I am obsessed with the materiality of painting, material experimentation, and the unexpected chance events that paint can reveal to me. Something new happens whenever I start a new work and pour colour. The work begins slightly out of my control, and I have to work with whatever’s happened.” —Emma McIntyre.

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.