Antonia Showering

Antonia Showering’s work is acutely personal. With colour palettes inspired by the shifting seasons, she depicts friends, family and lovers in dreamy landscapes. Nostalgia emanates throughout, while the comforting-yet-uncanny settings explore notions of home and displacement informed by the artist’s mixed English, Swiss and Chinese heritage. As well as drawing inspiration from painting throughout history — ancient cave paintings, Fauvism, Edvard Munch, Tracy Emin and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye to name a few — Showering finds inspiration in her own work. “I think it’s important to look back and almost steal from your old paintings.” By repeating and elaborating on previous motifs across her entire practice she creates connections which - much like life, love and friendship - become complex networks of interrelated events.

Showering’s process has a parallel logic. Her technique begins with linen stretched onto a frame and then sealed with rabbit glue. She then applies washes of diluted oil paint and adds broad, intuitive brushstrokes on top. These abstract marks form the base of the compositions from which she “picks” out figures in intimate poses - embracing, swimming, washing, kissing. These physical layers accumulate in the same way that memory does, blurring reality and imagination. In her own words: “My paintings try and explore how memory works through stacking lots of recollections on top of one another.”