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Lot Essay
Emma McIntyre’s vivid abstractions are firmly rooted in art history. Interrogating a range of different motifs and compositional strategies gleaned from a highly sophisticated understanding of her medium, McIntyre sets out to explore painting’s material and alchemical possibilities. In the present work, eponymous to the artist’s solo show with Air de Paris, the artist uses a combination of oil and oilstick to produce an active composition incorporating delicate clouds of soft pinks and yellows, woven together with gestures of muscular blues, purples, and whites.
The title, Up bubbles her amorous breath, is a coy, feminized reference to the final line of John Keats poem, Sonnet. On A Picture of Leander – the tragedy of the Greek mythical Leander, who perished during a storm while swimming to visit his love, Hero. In this vein, the painting can be read as romantic love caught up in a tragic storm. These expressive surfaces are created by the artist pouring pigment directly onto the surface of her canvas while it is laid horizontally. Once McIntyre lifts the canvas up vertically, she then adds her array of linear marks. At each stage she works both intuitively and with a degree of projection, resulting in canvases that are imbued with a rich, chromatic sophistication. The emotional poignance of this tragic romance was also investigated beautifully by Cy Twombly in his 1985 work, Hero and Leandro.
Often leaving her materials to find their path, McIntyre embraces the idea that her paintings create their own journey. “What’s exciting for me is the way materials sit on the surface and interact. But I also think of painting as world-building. Some paintings evoke landscapes, vistas, or weather systems. It’s a different type of depth. You can fall into my paintings, be taken elsewhere, then be brought back to the reality that they’re abstract paintings” (E. McIntyre, “Emma McIntyre Leads You Part of the Way There,” Ocula, 25 March 2025, online [accessed: 4/14/2025]).
The title, Up bubbles her amorous breath, is a coy, feminized reference to the final line of John Keats poem, Sonnet. On A Picture of Leander – the tragedy of the Greek mythical Leander, who perished during a storm while swimming to visit his love, Hero. In this vein, the painting can be read as romantic love caught up in a tragic storm. These expressive surfaces are created by the artist pouring pigment directly onto the surface of her canvas while it is laid horizontally. Once McIntyre lifts the canvas up vertically, she then adds her array of linear marks. At each stage she works both intuitively and with a degree of projection, resulting in canvases that are imbued with a rich, chromatic sophistication. The emotional poignance of this tragic romance was also investigated beautifully by Cy Twombly in his 1985 work, Hero and Leandro.
Often leaving her materials to find their path, McIntyre embraces the idea that her paintings create their own journey. “What’s exciting for me is the way materials sit on the surface and interact. But I also think of painting as world-building. Some paintings evoke landscapes, vistas, or weather systems. It’s a different type of depth. You can fall into my paintings, be taken elsewhere, then be brought back to the reality that they’re abstract paintings” (E. McIntyre, “Emma McIntyre Leads You Part of the Way There,” Ocula, 25 March 2025, online [accessed: 4/14/2025]).