Emma McIntyre /
Among my swan /
Mar 25 – May 10, 2025 /
Opening: Tuesday, Mar 25, 3pm – 7pm /
David Zwirner
5-6/F, H Queen’s
80 Queen’s Road Central
Central, Hong Kong
Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm
+852 21195900
David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by New Zealand–born and Los Angeles–based artist Emma McIntyre at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. This is McIntyre’s first solo show in Asia.
McIntyre creates vivid abstractions imbued with chromatic and gestural energy. Made with oils and unconventional substances like oxidized iron, her instinctual yet deeply considered works explore the alchemical possibilities of the painted medium and expand traditional understandings of landscape and the natural world. The artist’s practice is protean and rhizomatic; each painting shares its roots with the ones before and after it, enacting an endlessly transformative system of generation and discovery.
The show in Hong Kong, Among my swan, shares its title with a 1996 album by the band Mazzy Star that has inspired McIntyre; moreover, it alludes to the depictions of swans and cranes that often surface in her work and were also recurrent motifs for artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke. With their elegant, curlicued necks, McIntyre’s avians act as historical and mythical harbingers as well as tools of spatial orientation that signify the presence of open air and endless waters.
Building on McIntyre’s ongoing material and conceptual investigations, the paintings in Among my swan share a central focus on the transformation of images and mediums. The artist situates her paintings in a theatrical context in which space is rendered much like a stage set—a landscape built up from overlapping layers that collapse various locations and perspectives, both real and imagined, onto the same picture plane.
Other works are accented with patterns or borders made from unexpected materials: McIntyre creates rasterlike dots using the imprint of bubble wrap, for example, and repurposes a cut radicchio into a stamp that leaves behind a blossoming floral design. The resulting compositions provide an unorthodox path toward painterly abstraction—one that is rooted in textiles, craft, and domestic and interior spaces.
As the artist remarks: “Any idea of ‘pure’ abstraction is destroyed the moment I pick up a tube of paint. Pigments are made up of the world itself—the tube in my hand may contain blackened bones, crushed precious metals, the excretion of beetles, dirt, among many other things.… As these paintings develop, each is suggestive of a distinct environment or weather system, like little worlds within a larger ecosystem. They move through atmospheric space, cloud formations, watery environments, dirt, dust, domestic realms, wallpaper, through to earthly and almost hellish scenes. I aim to complicate abstraction, and my interest in landscape feeds into that.”
Images: Tiepolo pink, White chalk south against time, and Infernetto (detail)by Emma McIntyre, 2024. © Emma McIntyre. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
