Announcing the Representation of Emma McIntyre

Emma McIntyre. Photo by Brad Torchia

We’re pleased to announce the representation of New Zealand–born, Los Angeles-based painter Emma McIntyre in collaboration with Château Shatto. In the fall of 2023, the artist’s work was the subject of a celebrated solo exhibition, An echo, a stain, at our 69th Street gallery in New York, and an exhibition of her work is planned for our Hong Kong gallery.

Emma McIntyre, Eros Hog, 2023 (detail)

“I have my touch points in each movement, and Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Twombly, Bonnard, Watteau in particular are artists I come back to again and again. I am also very indebted to German painting. I look to Polke more than anyone else at the moment, and although my project is vastly different from his, his investment in paint as a material and his interest in pushing materiality to the absolute limits as well as his interest in alchemy is influential.”

—Emma McIntyre

Installation view, Emma McIntyre: An echo, a stain, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

Emma McIntyre was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1990 and lives and works in Los Angeles. 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 co-operative gallery Coastal Signs, Auckland.

Recent solo exhibitions of McIntyre’s work include An echo, a stain, David Zwirner, New York; 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.

Emma McIntyre, Song to the Siren, 2023 (detail)

“McIntyre’s citational practice extends beyond broad appropriations to more specific points of reference, such as J. M. W. Turner’s vast mercurial skies and his flirtations with picturing loosened from representation.”

—Suzanne Hudson, Artforum

Installation view, Emma McIntyre: An echo, a stain, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

In her vivid abstractions, McIntyre combines chance-based, intuitive processes with motifs and strategies gleaned from a close study of art history—from the Renaissance and the rococo to Helen Frankenthaler, Sigmar Polke, and Cy Twombly—into a mode of painting all her own. Says David Zwirner, “Emma’s practice manages to fuse the new and the familiar in spectacular fashion.”

Emma McIntyre, Duets in the dust, 2023 (detail)

“Her paintings often dance around the edges, but close to their heart there is a pause, a rest, a sunny glade that pulls you right in.”

—Dean Kissick, Cultured

Emma McIntyre in her studio in Los Angeles, 2023. Photo by Chantal Anderson

“I’m interested in a painting practice being a slippery, shifting, unnamable thing most of the time.”

—Emma McIntyre