David Zwirner brings Emma McIntyre and her paintings to Hong Kong

While the spotlight this month may be on the big art fairs in town, Hong Kong’s top galleries are launching their own must-see shows. Jaz Kong reports on the solo exhibition of Emma McIntyre at David Zwirner

Emma McIntyre at David Zwirner, March 25–May 10 

Born in 1990 in New Zealand, the now Los Angeles– based Emma McIntyre is among the youngest artists that blue-chip gallery David Zwirner currently represents. Feeling the freedom of being away from her home country, McIntyre explores the landscape and art scene of LA, while taking her sensual and poetic yet experimental artistic expression on one adventure after another. Among my swan, opening March 25 at David Zwirner Hong Kong, is the young artist’s first solo in Asia, and second show with the gallery following An echo, a stain in New York in 2023. With her distinctive vivid and sensual abstraction made from unconventional materials such as bubble wrap, and incorporating an oxidising paint (or as McIntyre puts it, “alchemy painting”), the artist has conjured a series of paintings inspired by Among my swan, a 1996 album by the band Mazzy Star, as well as the eminent ballet performance Black Swan as an echo of her stage-like composition. 

Although McIntyre grew up in a “big city”, she admits there are still more sheep than humans in her hometown. Her family tree is basically made up of artists of different genres, and this influence has had a lasting impact. “I grew up with a lot of love for paintings and art around me, and lots of art books in the house too,” McIntyre says. “Every time we went on holiday anywhere, we’d always be going to the museums and the galleries.” But more importantly, “I think there was also this attention to detail that was a big part of my life. Growing up, my parents would often see the world so visually, and they would notice and point out beautiful things and aesthetic moments around. I guess learning to look very intently in the way that painters have to look intently at the world was interesting for me.” 

That said, McIntyre never really felt she fit in to the art environment in New Zealand, despite its vast spaces and landscape still influencing her. She describes it as something a little dark: “No matter where you live in New Zealand, the landscape is such a big part of your experience. In terms of the art world in New Zealand, the history of painting is a history of landscape painting and how painters respond to landscape. And I think that is always in me, this sense of experiencing space through landscape and through volume and the form of the land. At the same time, when I was in art school in New Zealand, I was always looking at abstract painters overseas. I really was very attracted to colour and I can have a sense of play in painting. And sometimes there’s something quite dark about New Zealand – such as humour, New Zealand art and New Zealand creative output – and I really appreciate that. But it didn’t quite gel with me. I felt like I was a little out of place in terms of what I was pursuing in my own work.” 

Whether or not Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” was a catalyst for McIntyre, she did get an 18-month visa and moved to New York when she was 21, during which time she had to work three or four jobs just to pay the rent. “But I also spent a lot of time going to museums and galleries, and I assisted an artist as well,” she recalls. 

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“I had a studio that I sometimes made work in and I just had a really amazing time. I guess it spurred my love for being in a big city, and it’s also one of the cultural capitals of the world.” A couple years and an MFA later, with the encouragement of her gallery in New Zealand, McIntyre applied for and won a Fulbright award to earn another MFA at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. The artist hasn’t left the
LA region since. 

Apart from the fact that “there’s a lot of love for painting here,” McIntyre also enjoys being a kind of outsider in LA. “I like the idea of being unmoored from context and that to me feels freeing. I don’t quite fit in here because I’m not American, and I’m not from here. But I’m not in New Zealand, so I don’t quite fit in there either. So for me, it feels like a sense of freedom.” Instead of feeling insecure or fearful, this is quite a positive state of mind for McIntyre, as she explains, “I don’t think that fear is something I suffer from as an artist. I think I’m somehow free – long may it last.” 

Freedom allows a lot of things to happen, and McIntyre not only needs freedom but also the potential chaotic energy that follows for her creative process. “I think chaos is okay. I like chaos. When I start the paintings by pouring, I’m laying the canvas flat and I’m pouring from above. I really like taking the chance that where the paint enters, it’s my starting point. So then I know that whatever I’m left with at that point, it’s like a challenge. I want each time that I start the painting, maybe with pouring or however else I start, that it’s offering something quite new and maybe it’s like chaos, maybe it’s very quiet. Because then I can respond to it differently each time and that really keeps it interesting for me. And kind of creates variety. And it’s like setting up new kinds of constructive problems to solve.” 

Chaos is an energy, which perhaps allows McIntyre’s paintings to come alive. “I look at Sigmar Polke and Robert Rauschenberg quite a bit. Rauschenberg really worked with the oxidation process of metals and etching to make some of his works. And Polke was always using unconventional and interesting materials to make his works. So I was thinking about how I can incorporate some kinds of metal that I can oxidise into my own practice without having to move away from the canvas, because I’m very attracted to linen. I love working on linen and the kind of bouncy surface of the canvas. Then I found this iron paint by doing some Google searches. Basically it’s like a patina in paint. So I paint it onto my canvas as if it’s a primer and it’s this blue grey. And then I use an oxidising solution, which I guess is probably chemical components of vinegar or salt, which instantly rusts the surface. 

“That’s also exciting for me, because I always like to think about this idea of a painting having a life beyond my intervention that continues to change beyond my intervention. The idea of the autonomy of the painting and kind of the magic of painting, I guess I could say, is this alchemical process.” 

In terms of “brushes”, McIntyre also opts for some unconventional – bizarre, even – materials. “I used to make the marks on the painting, sometimes with things lying around where I’m like, let’s see how this goes if I try to use it as a brush. So then the bubble wrap came about because I really love incorporating some kind of clashing into the painting because my background in abstraction began when I was working with the grid a lot and thinking about textiles. I was using it like a lot of polka dots. And I’ve always loved incorporating dots into the work because they kind of allude to passion
and decoration. They’re quite domestic and they’re a little gaudy.” To a lot of people’s surprise, the most out- of-the-ordinary tool McIntyre has ever used is radicchio. She explains, “I cut a radicchio in half and I was stamping it because that cross section of the radicchio looks like a rose. So yeah, I guess a vegetable is probably the strangest thing [I used] lately.” 

Another thing to note is that McIntyre’s works always echo with one another. All of them are part of her journey, her exploration of the world. However, she emphasises that “it’s not a linear continuum. It’s like a rhizome continuum. There are these threads that connect all the paintings. Every time I make a painting, it creates ideas for five more paintings I could make. So in that way there’s a relationship to storytelling, but it’s very different from a novel because it’s not linear. I guess it’s more like poetry. Everything is connected, but not as continuous fragments. 

For the upcoming Among my swan show, this Madonna and Björk and Mazzy Star lover will also be featuring some Black Swan–inspired artworks. “For the Hong Kong show, the idea is the paintings’ relationship to theatre and the stage. For me, painting is world building. I find it particularly interesting for myself as an abstract painter as to what kind of world I’m building. And I like this relationship to the theatre because there’s both real and imagined depth, spatial depth. And these different kinds of elements of drama are an interesting analogy. And I’ve always thought about the framing of painting as related to the proscenium frame, the kind of frame of the theatre and the curtains. And then I have these striated cores which are almost like the veil coming down or a curtain coming down on the work.” 

Does that mean McIntyre believes it’s an artist’s role to “create” a different world, or even a utopia, for his or her audiences to escape to? “I don’t think there’s any particular role for an artist. I think that the most important thing is that there’s no expectations of artists to behave or create work for a certain group of people. I think the art world is the most dynamic and interesting when all of those things are happening at once and people aren’t expecting one thing or another from artists. I like to think about the paintings as having these layers of private narrative that aren’t necessarily accessible. That is, maybe sometimes they are accessible, sometimes they are not. But I also feel strongly about painting being a non-verbal thing that’s accessed in a different way.” 

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