Just a little over a year ago, David Zwirner announced the representation of New Zealand-born, Los Angeles-based artist Emma McIntyre, describing his experience of her work as “love at first sight.” The buzz around McIntyre and her lush abstract paintings has been growing ever since.
The 2022 CULTURED Young Artist’s new show, "Among My Swan," runs through May 10 at Zwirner’s Hong Kong location and marks her first solo show in Asia. The exhibition shares its title with a 1996 Mazzy Star album and finds McIntyre expanding her practice in both scale and medium. As I prepared for my trip to Asia for Art Basel Hong Kong, which opens to VIPs on Wednesday, I caught up with Emma, whose work I’ve admired for years. We get into the nitty-gritty details of her relationships with art dealers, the surprisingly quick process of rust oxidation, and the one thing she’d change about the art world.
Sophia Cohen: I was drawn to your work when I saw it at Frieze New York in 2022. I walked by, and the gallerists were telling me, There's a huge line for these works. And I was like, I’m really interested. What do you have? I stayed on it until I could buy a piece. One of the things that made me super interested in you was that I'm a big Laura Owens fan, and I know you are, too. I wanted to talk about your journey to Los Angeles, studying here, and being under that umbrella of great female abstraction painting.
Emma McInytre: I lived in New York when I was younger. I had always wanted to come back. I studied for my MFA in New Zealand and won a Fulbright Award to move back to the States. At that point, I was like, Well, obviously, I want to study at one of these storied institutions in LA. I started looking into art schools and realized that Laura Owens actually taught at ArtCenter. And my friend Fiona Connor, who taught at almost every art school in LA, was like, "The two schools you'd want to go to right now are ArtCenter or UCLA." I ended up at ArtCenter and am still here in LA five and a half years later.
Cohen: You had a very signature style already. How did studying in LA impact your career?
McIntyre: Moving from New Zealand to LA was a dramatic shift. I got deeply obsessed with the history of painting when I was at ArtCenter. I was suddenly looking very closely at Rococo and French painting and learning more about American art history as well. The set of references that you think is the entire art world’s set of references shifts so much the moment you move cities. Suddenly, I was like, Oh, there are all these different theorists and art writers that everyone in the ArtCenter program holds dear that I was just not looking at at all in New Zealand.
Cohen: Rococo holds an interesting place in art history. Some historians took it seriously, and others didn't. It was a quicker movement, and then history moved on. Why were you drawn to it, and how can we see these little touches in your work?
McIntyre: I have always been interested in the decorative in art, and taking it seriously. I was interested in not just the sensuality of the content but also the sensuality of the touch of the brush. I was looking very closely at the way things were painted, more so than the content itself, and what that was conveying.
Cohen: There's a lot of emotion behind it. It's very passionate.
McIntyre: Especially at the time when I was looking closely at Rococo, I was making sensual paintings and emulating some of those Rococo-esque brush strokes. I have always been interested in thinking of the painting as a stage. A lot of Rococo painters went to the theater and made quick sketches in order to compose their scene paintings or landscape paintings.
Cohen: That makes sense. Just thinking about your work, every stroke seems to be thought about.
McIntyre: Thinking about the drama of it, the event, and the framing, as quite often my paintings end up with this proscenium frame. For me, the idea has its origins in the framing of some historical painting, which is also the framing of, say, the curtains of the theater.
Cohen: I've read about how you start with the canvas on the floor, and then you end up finishing it on the wall. Are you immersing yourself in the painting, and then looking at it and seeing what else you have to do?
McIntyre: I am so 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 color. The work begins slightly out of my control, and I have to work with whatever's happened. Then, when I move the work from the floor up onto the wall, I'm like, Okay, I can feel out where this painting is going. Something about the nature of this particular pour is evoking landscape. It starts to give me ideas about the next steps and what the composition will be. In other cases, I'm like, Oh, this is very flat, and it'll very much stay in the realm of abstraction.
Cohen: One of your paintings that I saw at [your] Zwirner [solo in 2023] was this rusty painting, and I've read that you use an oxidized solution to create that look. It was one of the best paintings in that show, in my opinion. How does that technique work? And what effect do you feel like it creates?
McInytre: I was thinking about Sigmar Polke's unconventional materials, materials that change over time. Robert Rauschenberg also used oxidization for some of his works. Then I was thinking about Andy Warhol's piss paintings and the oxidation process there. I found this product, rust patina or iron oxide paint––a crafting product. It's for painting your angel in your garden to make it look like it's been rusted by the weather. I'm familiar with the color of iron, because the place I come from in New Zealand is a black sand beach. It's iron sand, so it's this particular blue-gray. You have to paint this iron paint onto the surface and then pour this oxidizing solution on top, which is like a saline solution or a vinegar solution. But the chemical components instantly rust the surface as the oxidizing solution dries.
Cohen: How long does that usually take?
McIntyre: It probably dries as fast as water. Usually, I would go home, and come back the next morning, and it would be completely rusted. I liked this idea of a painting which continues to change beyond my intervention.
Cohen: In this case, you're relinquishing more of that control to the materiality. And it sounds like, if you love Rauschenberg, then you will accept the realities of materiality. I call Polke a chameleon artist. He has reinvented himself a thousand times. I'll be curious to see the collage work, layering, and leaning more into these artists, and see where that takes you to the next stage of your career.
McIntyre: It feels like there are endless possibilities for experimentation when I'm not limited to just paint, so who knows? There's a lot of generative potential there.
Cohen: You're opening the door to a lot of exciting things. It must be so exciting to be one of the younger artists on an incredible roster like Zwirner's, especially for a gallery that doesn't take on a lot of very young artists. You're also a founding board member of the cooperative gallery Coastal Signs in Auckland. Has that experience informed the way you form relationships with art dealers?
McIntyre: Before Coastal Signs was Coastal Signs, Sarah Hopkinson, who helms the ship, had her own gallery called Hopkinson Mossman, with whom I worked as well. Sarah has been my art dealer and one of my best friends for like eight years now. Her previous gallery was more conventional than Coastal Signs, and it was a great introduction to what it's like to work with an art dealer and what I should expect from them. From very early on, I was empowered to focus on the work I wanted to make, and she was just here to support me. If I wanted to show two paintings or ten paintings in the show, that was up to me. She wasn't telling me what to do. She wasn't like, I like that painting, make more of those. It wasn't about sales. It was helpful because I knew what a good relationship with a gallery is. I had an experience early on in LA where I was like, This is not the way it should be. And I have lots of friends here who I don't think know any differently than the dealer coming in and saying they need 10 paintings.
Cohen: It sounds like you were lucky to have someone early on who is going to treat artists right, so props to your dealer. Some artists have bad experiences, sometimes they feel comfortable jumping ship whenever. And it's nice to see an artist that's still involved with their first dealer.
McIntyre: When she proposed the Coastal Signs structure to all of us artists involved, I was on board, because she just wants to show the work she thinks is interesting. She always wants to figure out a structure where she can have these non-saleable shows by young artists. Coastal Signs has been an interesting learning for me, too, because everything about the way a gallery operates is suddenly transparent. We see the budget, the amount of money coming in and going out, and how much everything costs. Sarah tells us everything, we all weigh in and make decisions. I also believe in the art world in New Zealand and want to continue to support the young artists who are trying to have careers there. It's really hard. There is a market, but not like here.
Cohen: You're getting a glimpse into the back room, which is usually something artists don't know about. How did those conversations start with Zwirner, and how do you think the relationship you had with Sarah––that positive, open, and transparent relationship––impacted the conversation between you and the gallery?
McIntyre: That conversation began through Liv Barrett and Chateau Shatto. I think that Marlene Zwirner came by the Frieze [LA] booth, started talking to Liv, and was like, Who is this artist? and I guess, brought David by later in the day. I have to thank Liv. She advocated for me. Then, the idea of the New York show [at David Zwirner in fall 2023] was proposed. When the show was getting closer, I started to have direct dialogue with Marlene. I love working with her because she's very frank and open about the way the gallery side of things works, too, which was refreshing and unexpected.
Cohen: You are about to have your first show in Hong Kong. What tidbits can you give us before it opens?
McIntyre: It is a continuation of the New York show in that I think of my practice as rhizomic, so all the paintings are connected, but the paintings are big. There is one particularly large painting, the biggest size we've ever worked with. And then, there are, of course, the small paintings as well, because they're an important part of the practice. I've developed this new way of pouring, which is this striated pour. That felt new for me and relates to my thinking about the theater because they feel like they could be stage curtains falling, some of these drips, vertical drips. There's also one large rust painting.
Cohen: I do appreciate you enjoying the small scale, because when artists who jump to these bigger galleries go big, big, big, then there's nowhere left to go.
McIntyre: I was very conscious of that. I had these two really big stretcher bars in my studio. And because I did want to see what it felt like to go bigger, it was interesting, but it was also frustrating because I don't have studio assistants. I'd have to call my husband every time I needed to move a stretcher, so I'd be stuck with the giant work on the floor that I'm having to work around until he could come down and help me move it onto the wall.
Cohen: When you get a bigger studio, I'm sure it'll be a fond memory, although frustrating in the moment. As an artist who has had great experiences for the most part, is there anything that you would change about the art world?
McIntyre: The opportunistic behavior of some dealers and collectors has ramped up in recent years, taking advantage of many young artists’ lack of experience as they try to make their way in this fairly opaque industry. I wish that didn’t exist.
Cohen: Yes, that rush to find the next star. Which can lead to taking advantage of people who don’t know what's going on. I think that a lot of people look at your career and think, How lucky is that? And I think that a lot of that comes from you surrounding yourself with good people.
McIntyre: I have been lucky to have the right people on my side from the start, who have shown me what a respectful and supportive professional relationship looks like. I also grew up in the art world because I'm from a family of artists, so it's never been a foreign world to me. But I see how many artists come into it not knowing anything, and that's fine. I just hate that they're then exploited.
