Emma McIntyre Makes Powerful, Sensual Artworks With Everything From Rust to Bubble Wrap

“Anything in my studio can become a tool,” says the painter Emma McIntyre, who uses everything from rags and rubber spatulas to radicchio and rolls of bubble wrap to create her sensuously heady abstractions. McIntyre’s work is punctuated by spectral motifs, like an angel’s wing or a peony blossom, often created using her signature stamping techniques: Bubble wrap leaves a pixelated design; halved chicory makes a floral impression. It’s a hazy August day in L.A.’s Bendix building— a fashion district hub of artists and ateliers, famous for its neon roof sign—as McIntyre readies 25 new paintings made since March to ship out for her show “This body holds / swamp stuff,” which opens this week at David Zwirner’s Tribeca flagship.

The studio’s concrete pillars, metal casement windows, and battered beige vinyl tile flooring “is very downtown L.A.,” says the 36-year-old New Zealander about the space she’s had since earning her second MFA, from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, in 2021. She points to the street below: “It’s just really cranking out here, or I can look out to the mountains when there’s not too much smog or a marine layer.” Kahu, her beloved 11-year-old rescue, watches attentively from his bed. “I brought him over from New Zealand,” she tells me. “He loves whoever’s visiting and gets dog hair all over them.”

A fourth-generation painter, back to her great-grandfather, McIntyre finished her first graduate degree at the University of Auckland. Growing up, her artist-professor father described the exhilaration of visiting the New York art scene in his 20s; after college, in 2011, McIntyre “hung out” in New York on a yearlong visa. As promised, she found herself blown away by art “in the flesh,” which she’d only experienced in books.

“At that time, Chelsea was really popping off and I decided to somehow study in the States,” she recalls. She was already showing with a gallery in New Zealand, and stayed there until 2019, when a prestigious Fulbright fellowship brought her back to the U.S. to enroll at the Art Center. “I was in shock when I got a Fulbright, because I thought it was just for rocket scientists,” McIntyre says, chuckling. Her compositions, even then, garnered comparisons to the ferocity of Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell.

Taking its title from a line by beat poet Diane di Prima’s “Show Me Your Other Body,” the Zwirner exhibition “is visceral and swampy,” explains McIntyre. “And there’s an elemental quality to the poem that feels right.” The recent paintings address ideas she’s been “obsessing over” since 2022. Namely, disrupting the notion of a finished painting, as she describes it, by brushing gray-blue iron paint onto her canvases before pouring an oxidizing liquid on top. As the solution dries, the surface rusts.

“Each time I make one of these rust works there’s new experimentation,” she says. “Painters always ask themselves, When is the painting finished? I really like the idea that a painting can continue to change over time beyond the artist’s intervention.” That fascination tracks with her love of Sigmar Polke and Robert Rauschanberg, who both applied tarnishing agents to their pieces, as well as Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings, in which friends peed on canvases coated with metallic copper paint to fantastically corrosive effect.

With this show, McIntyre drops a new twist, layering bubble wrap over the oxidant while it’s still wet “to see what happens.” The outcome is an organic-seeming pattern on the rusted landscapes. “I’ve always been compelled by the idea of polka dots in painting, and I’m trying to sneak that in somehow,” she muses. “Bubble wrap is this mass-produced thing. But each little bubble renders itself like an individual rose or flower. Or brains. Or walnuts.”

For the first time, she also tried oxidized copper paint, which yielded a brilliant, textured blue. “I think of ‘Beautiful old lies’ as my Giotto painting,” she says, referring to the crushed lapis the 14th-century Italian artist used for the sky in the Scrovegni Chapel frescos. “I’ve always been trying to achieve Giotto’s ‘Padua blue,’ but something about this oxidized surface made this really chalky intense color, more like him than ever before.” For a contrasting note of realism, she added a disembodied birdlike wing—an homage to the famous angel of his frescoes. As ideas take root, “there’s a lot of just sitting here, staring at my work,” McIntyre says. She pauses at a distressed Scandinavian chair facing her paintings, and notes “that the leather has the patina of age, very oxidized.”

“I do categorize some of this show as monochrome, which is quite new for me,” McIntyre says, walking to a rich, gritty matte black canvas, Crackle and drag (2026). “It’s actually a really common color, but I’m interested that it’s made of burnt animal bones.” Pigments are often manufactured using unexpected materials, she explains, like charcoal or peach seeds, so “the paints are alchemic already, with so much information that’s not readily available to the viewer.” The third “monochrome work,” This iliaster flowers like the wind (2026), vaguely suggests a nude figure in an intense red hue named hemoglobin. It’s a body print of McIntyre’s torso and forearm; to make it, she positioned herself like Andromeda in Titian’s famous Perseus and Andromeda painting. “I’ve been thinking about this one as this landscape of blood,” she explains. “It feels incredibly bodily, but also a little erotically charged.”

Along with Renaissance masters, rococo landscapes by Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard are driving sources of inspiration—especially the theatricality of their outdoor scenes. New Zealand’s coastal terrain is also an important influence. “Water is a big part of life there: lakes, rivers, rain, mist, fog and wind,” McInture says. “I think my paintings are often about weather systems. In New Zealand, everything’s corroded by the elements. Everything’s leaking, moldy, damp and rusting.”