Antonia Showering
Antonia Showering is a London based figurative painter who is known for her mysterious, psychologically fraught fine art, with one or multiple subjects set against nebulous mountain ranges or in scenes of enigmatic domesticity. The artist creates emotionally charged works that put the past on view into presence, almost longing to embody a truer representation of her recollections of landscapes, family, and encounters on top of one another.
The artist begins the process by applying distemper onto raw canvas, roughly brushing across the surface. The first coats of paint pigment react with the ground, creating aqueous, abstract forms in pools of colour. Showering uses them as the foundation for scenes that come out through subsequent layers, sometimes suggestive of landscapes that combine her Swiss and Chinese heritage. Using a generous palette of carmine, plum, marigold and amber, the artist works from abstraction back towards figuration and then paints back into the compositions that present themselves as a result of countless pellucid washes of oil. Showering’s subjects are nonetheless eerily fleshy and alive. Her figures seem to glide in and out of their surroundings, while some elements like lakes, rolling hills and mountains collapse into fluid pools of paint. These areas of abstraction, which seem on the verge of shifting into other forms, nod to the ever-shifting realities of memory, fantasy and desire.
For Showering water is a recurring motif, compatible with memory. It is reflective, subtle, liquid and as an entity that conceals or obscures hidden depths. In works such as Endless Search, the ripples of a mountain lake swirl in contrasting hues of green, yellow and blue, inculcating the scene with hallucinatory potential. The paintings echo some of the common characteristics of the Symbolists, but also in the tender portrayals of domestic life by artists like Modersohn-Becker. They share a powerful relationship with nature, inspired by the landscape of memory and their particular surroundings.
Showering wants her paintings to express the mood of transitory moments where trauma, worries and hope can coexist in one moment or image. She perceives canvas as a physical space where feelings of belonging or displacement, love or loneliness, intergenerational memory, superstitions and regrets can be turned into something visual and shared with the viewer. The narratives that materialise out of Showering’s creative process are simultaneously personal and universal. Most frequent is that of love, in all its numerous forms as it remains the leitmotif: unconditional, corresponding, full of hope.
