Emma McIntyre at Chris Sharp Gallery

In Mid-City, Chris Sharp, the former proprietor of Mexico City’s Lulu, has just opened up a new gallery space, the outside of which is painted a lush sky blue. Inside, Emma McIntyre’s paintings evoke a different type of landscape—her abstract works swirl with various brush marks, scrapes and drips, and subtly elicit landscapes both earthen and bodily. Each is layered with rich underpainting, then an array of painterly moves (washes of color, dripping pools of paint, small staccato brush marks, impressions made from tools used to carefully rake paint away). A close look reveals the artist’s own body imprinted on the surface of a couple of paintings; rogue thumbs and limbs that were pressed into the painting as if just another method of mark-making. Like Sharp’s own bright blue exterior, each of McIntyre’s paintings play with light — in several, a series of painted dabs churn around a glowing underlayer, creating tunnel-like depth that pulls you into each surface and its myriad of juicy details. The works teeter between the body, landscape, and abstraction, ultimately uncovering a porous space between the three.

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Photo: Emma McIntyre, “The problem of vivacity,” 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery.