NEW YORK — What if a painting were less like a finished image and more like a living ecosystem—one shaped by chemical reactions, physical gestures, chance encounters, and the passage of time?
That question animates Emma McIntyre’s This body holds / swamp stuff, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper at David Zwirner’s Tribeca gallery. On view from September 18 through October 24, 2026, the presentation brings together works that treat paint not simply as a medium for depicting the world, but as a substance with its own capacity to transform, spread, stain, crack, and surprise. <Cite refs={[“turn163208search0″,”turn163208search1”]}/>
Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1990 and now based in Los Angeles, McIntyre has developed a distinctive approach to abstraction that combines instinctive mark-making with a close engagement with art history. In these works, oil paint meets iron oxide, oxidized copper, oil stick, and unconventional tools and surfaces. The resulting compositions move between organic forms and geometric structures, suggesting bodies, weather systems, botanical patterns, and landscapes without settling into straightforward representation.
The exhibition’s title, drawn from a poem by Diane di Prima, evokes mud as a thick, life-generating substance. It offers a fitting entry point into McIntyre’s practice, where material instability becomes a source of creative possibility.
Painting as an Unpredictable Process
McIntyre’s paintings are built through a process of pouring, impressing, layering, rubbing, and combining materials. Instead of treating every mark as the product of a fully predetermined plan, she allows chemical and physical processes to influence the direction of a work.
In Solve et coagula (2026), for example, an oxidizing agent is poured over iron-based paint, producing rust-orange blooms across a gray ground. The resulting patterns appear almost geological, as if the surface has recorded a process of decay and renewal. McIntyre has described her interest in allowing rust to continue changing beyond her direct intervention, raising questions about where artistic control ends and the material’s independent behavior begins. <Cite refs={[“turn163208search0″,”turn163208search1”]}/>
This openness to chance does not mean the paintings are uncontrolled. McIntyre responds to the material’s behavior, making decisions about composition, color, and texture as unexpected effects emerge. The finished work becomes a record of negotiation between intention and accident.
That approach gives her abstractions a physical intensity. Their surfaces are not merely windows into imagined worlds; they are objects bearing evidence of their own making.
The Body Leaves Its Mark
The human body is another recurring presence in the exhibition, sometimes appearing not as a recognizable figure but as an impression embedded in the painted surface.
In This iliaster flowers like the wind (2026), a large-scale painting dominated by scarlet, salmon, and bright pink, an impression of the artist’s arms and torso appears in white paint near the left edge. The image suggests an internal landscape, with colors and contours that evoke flesh, movement, and bodily presence. Traces of the canvas’s stretcher bars also emerge across the composition, introducing a geometric structure that complicates the painting’s organic appearance. <Cite refs={[“turn163208search0″,”turn163208search5”]}/>
These marks blur the distinction between the painter’s physical actions and the imagined world of the painting. The body becomes both an instrument of production and a subject suggested by the resulting forms.
Other works incorporate textures made with everyday materials. Bubble wrap pressed into wet paint can leave grids and honeycomb-like patterns; spray bottles create circular stains; and botanical motifs emerge through unconventional stamping techniques. Such processes introduce a productive tension between the artist’s gestures and the patterns generated by objects and substances.
The resulting surfaces feel at once intimate and expansive. They retain traces of touch while suggesting systems much larger than the individual body.
From Rust to Renaissance Blue
McIntyre’s material experimentation is accompanied by a wide-ranging dialogue with art history. Her paintings draw on historical visual languages without simply reproducing them, moving between contemporary abstraction and references to earlier traditions.
One striking example is Beautiful old lies (2026), which uses oxidized copper paint to produce a vivid azure surface. The color recalls the deep blue associated with lapis lazuli in Renaissance painting, particularly the heavenly skies in Giotto di Bondone’s frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. At the center of McIntyre’s composition is a semiabstract form derived from an angel’s wing in Giotto’s The Dream of Joachim. <Cite refs={[“turn163208search0″,”turn163208search1”]}/>
The reference creates an unusual encounter between historical imagery and contemporary material processes. An angelic detail from a medieval fresco is transformed into a floating form within a painting whose color comes from the chemistry of copper oxidation.
The effect is not simply nostalgic. McIntyre uses historical references as active components in a new visual language, allowing fragments of earlier art to coexist with contemporary gestures and materials.
Her interest in this kind of temporal layering is central to the exhibition. A painting can contain echoes of Renaissance color, modernist geometry, botanical imagery, and spontaneous marks without resolving those references into a single narrative.
When the Surface Becomes a Landscape
Throughout the exhibition, colors and motifs recur across different works, creating relationships that become more apparent as viewers move through the gallery.
Those muted those rain tones (2026), for instance, begins with an ivory-white background subtly patterned through the impression of bubble wrap. McIntyre then pours blue and green pigments across the surface, allowing the colors to interact through staining, cracking, and shifts in hue. A script-like line moves through the lower portion of the composition, bringing a graphic element into dialogue with the painting’s more fluid passages. <Cite refs={[“turn163208search0″,”turn163208search1”]}/>
The work suggests natural processes without depicting a specific place. Its greens and blues may evoke vegetation, water, or weather, but its patterns remain grounded in the physical behavior of the materials.
Elsewhere, the large diptych Violet for the temple veil (2026) uses inky blue-black forms across two panels, creating an image that can suggest a Rorschach test or the open pages of a book. The two surfaces echo one another without becoming identical, balancing repetition with variation. <Cite refs={[“turn163208search1″,”turn163208search5”]}/>
This interplay between order and unpredictability gives the exhibition its sense of rhythm. Individual works have their own identities, yet recurring colors, gestures, and patterns link them into a larger visual environment.
Small Works, Expansive Possibilities
Alongside the large canvases, McIntyre presents intimate works on paper and smaller paintings. These pieces function as more than preparatory studies. They are spaces for experimentation, where new combinations of color, marks, and materials can be tested and carried into larger compositions.
The process works in both directions. Ideas developed in smaller works can appear in expansive paintings, while colors mixed for a large canvas may find another life on paper. Some works on paper also retain impressions of the artist’s palette, incorporating evidence of the studio process into the finished composition. <Cite refs={[“turn163208search0″,”turn163208search1”]}/>
This cyclical approach challenges the idea of a painting as an isolated object. Each work becomes part of an ongoing process of discovery, connected to what came before and what may follow.
The relationship between the intimate and the monumental also changes how viewers experience the exhibition. A large painting can surround the eye with a dense field of color and texture, while a small work invites close inspection of individual marks and material interactions. Both scales offer different ways of understanding the same underlying investigation.
A World Still Becoming
This body holds / swamp stuff presents abstraction as a form of world-building. McIntyre’s paintings draw on natural processes, historical imagery, bodily impressions, and the unpredictable behavior of materials to create compositions that remain open to interpretation.
Their power lies partly in their refusal to settle into a single reading. A rust-colored bloom may resemble a geological formation; a blue mark may recall an angel’s wing; a network of impressions may suggest a grid, a plant, or a cellular structure. Each association offers a possibility rather than a definitive answer.
At a moment when digital images can be generated and circulated almost instantaneously, McIntyre’s attention to the physical life of paint emphasizes something different: the slow, contingent process through which a surface is made, altered, and understood.
Her paintings ask viewers to pay attention not only to what an image represents, but to how it came into being. Pigment, gesture, chemistry, and chance become collaborators in a process that never entirely separates control from uncertainty.
At David Zwirner, the result is an exhibition in which painting feels less like a fixed statement than a continuing event—one that holds traces of the body, the past, and the world’s capacity for transformation.
Exhibition details: Emma McIntyre: This body holds / swamp stuff is on view through October 24, 2026, at David Zwirner, 52 Walker Street, Tribeca, New York. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Visit the official exhibition page for details.
