British painter Antonia Showering renders emotionally charged landscapes in yellow-toned palettes, layered to capture the shifting nature of memory and the complexities of her Swiss-Chinese heritage.
Read MoreBorn in Somerset, in the southwest of England, Showering grew to love art at a young age, encouraged by a family of architects and art historians who taught her the importance of drawing and art's infinite possibilities.
After moving to London, Showering completed a BA at the City & Guilds of London Art School and an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Antonia Showering's paintings draw from the artist's multicultural heritage and her experience of place, culminating in hazy emotional landscapes that replicate the visceral nature of memory.
From a multicultural background of Swiss, Chinese, and British heritage, the artist often draws from her memories of place to inform her paintings. Regular motifs include the mountains from the Swiss villages where she is from, which serve as a symbol of strength for the artist.
These peaks recur across the artist's paintings, whether they are nostalgic compositions like How We Met (2021), which depicts a mother and child on a bicycle looking towards the mountains, or strident expressions like Ungrateful (2021), in which scarlet reds and Kelly greens depict the emotional state of each subject.
While Showering's use of place recalls the West, the yellow ochres and earth-toned shades used to render them evoke the East. The artist relates her engagement with nostalgia to a search for home, using colour to explore the complexities of belonging, while her subjects remain constant.
In the painting Untitled (2018), two yellow bodies are seated at the edge of a coal black ground looking towards a mountainous landscape, covered in the haze of memory.
Showering's paintings are made in stages, seeking to replicate the fluidity of memory and recollection. The artist works on each canvas in layers, before erasing elements back to the original surface, retaining traces of previous impressions.
Individual works retain their emotional charge while preserving coherent narratives through this process, which the artist relates to pentimento—the presence of traces of earlier images within a painting, which bears resemblance to Showering's method of stacking memories across the surface of her paintings.
In Malaise (2020), a sea of yellow ochre, deep greens, and faded garnet reds wash over a mountainscape, where two families rendered in the same yellows and greens merge with the backdrop in some places and stand out starkly in others.
Showering's subjects will often be her family members, including most often her younger brother, whose face appears across the artist's work as a motif for childhood memories and times past.
In a second Untitled painting from 2018, Showering's sibling is painted holding a small child, both rendered in naple yellow, looking along a yellow road where they are seated, perhaps expecting answers or an arrival.
'I wanted to turn the universal sensation of wanting to be held or to hold into a visual, tangible image on a canvas,' Showering confirms in a 2022 interview with Ocula Magazine.
Showering is the recipient of the 2018 Henry Tonks Award and the 2017 Chelsea Arts Club Award.
Antonia Showering's works have shown widely in Europe and the U.K.
Solo exhibitions include Timothy Taylor, London (2022) and White Cube (online), Hong Kong (2020).
Selected group exhibitions include Pi Artworks, London (2022); Timothy Taylor, London (2021); Union Gallery, London (2021, 2020); Choi and Lager, Cologne (2019); Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2019); South London Gallery (2018); TJ Boulting, London (2018); and V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2018).
The artist's website can be found here, and her Instagram here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2022
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