ANTONIA SHOWERING

In Showering’s radiant canvases, the artist translates processes of remembering and forgetting, capturing the ways in which we create narratives that shape our experiences of the world. Working intuitively with automatic mark-making, she leans into chance encounters with paint, coaxing form from spontaneous gestures. In the resulting layered compositions, figures inhabit familiar but ambiguous scenes haunted by spectral traces of underpaintings. Pentimento serves as a metaphor, reflecting the strange, nonlinear passage of time and the way distant experiences can remain forever present. Often, her subjects are physically entwined in scenarios that might be romantic, sexual, pained, therapeutic, or platonic—some, as the artist describes, ‘half-remembered, half-invented.’ In ambered, earthen hues, these scenes take on new dimension through moments of chromatic harmony and dissonance; each canvas possesses a luminosity achieved through accumulated washes of colour, evoking the hazy worlds of memory and dreams.

Showering’s new paintings focus on the inner workings of personal relationships, reflecting on the pronounced shifts that occur in one’s intergenerational roles, particularly the changing flows of responsibility and care. The canvases here revolve around the experience of assuming the duties of child-rearing while also confronting the mortality of one’s elders. There are other shifts, too: since her debut exhibition with the gallery in 2022, the artist has moved from London to the countryside in Somerset, where nature surrounds her remote studio. Her paintings often include mountains that face the valley where her maternal family are from in Switzerland—a topography that has long recurred in the artist’s work. As the contours of her life evolve, the artist explains, the mountains seem to be a constant.

In Secret Language (all 2024–25) a woman paints while holding a small child on her hip; her gaze is fixed on the painting. At the centre of the composition is the artist’s gloved hand, indicating an authorial zone between the duo and the painting she is creating. Yet the vivid, animated marks on the pictured canvas bleed into the space of the painter and her child as well as the palette she works from, suggesting the contexts are ultimately blurred. A digger—a favourite subject of small children—that appears in the lower right-hand corner of the depicted painting anchors this notion.

5L features a classical composition, in which four figures huddle over another who appears to have passed away. They embrace, each seemingly engaged in a personal moment of intense emotion. The figures emerge from and retreat into the boldly painted ground, where active expressions of fluid paint are tempered by rhythmic vertical strokes, like the gusts and gales of grief. Elsewhere, a rare unpopulated painting, After Life, depicts an Edenic landscape in which craggy mountains surround a peaceful inlet. Painted with broad, ecstatic strokes, the sky recalls the appearance of aurora borealis. Three cars are parked on the shore, as if in conversation, while two foxes sip from the water. Here, personal symbology comes together in an uncanny, transcendent scene.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Showering will be in conversation with art historian, curator, and broadcaster Katy Hessel, the author of The Story of Art Without Men. The event will take place at the gallery during the opening reception on Thursday 8 May at 5:30pm.