Antonia Showering

Antonia Showering (b. 1991, London, United Kingdom) is a British figurative painter based in Somerset. Known for her enigmatic and psychologically complex works, Showering’s paintings often feature solitary or paired figures set against misty mountain ranges or within ambiguous domestic spaces. Her figures seem to merge with their surroundings, with elements such as rolling hills, mountains, lakes, or pieces of furniture dissolving into fluid pools of paint. These moments of abstraction, on the verge of shifting into other forms, reflect the mutable realities of subjectivity, memory, imagination, and desire.

Showering works with a rich palette of marigold, amber, carmine, and plum, beginning with abstract layers of paint that pool in configurations shaped by gravity. She then works back into these compositions, a process that recalls the chance-based methods of Surrealism, particularly automatic drawing. The translucent layers of oil paint that build up on her paper and linen supports give her figures an eerie, fleshy vitality, despite their delicate surface.

In 2018, Showering received the New Contemporaries x SPACE Studio Bursary Award, The Great Women Artists Residency at Palazzo Monti, and the Henry Tonks Award.

Curated by writer and art historian Katy Hessel, Dwelling is the Light is the first in a series of group and solo online exhibitions planned for this spring. Inspired by the evolving effects of the current global lockdown on our attitudes towards nature versus domestic living, Dwelling is the Light presents a curated selection of works by contemporary female artists working within a range of mediums, from figurative and abstract painting to tapestry, sculpture and photography. The title of the exhibition is derived from William Wordsworth’s seminal 1798 poem ‘Tintern Abbey,’ which centers on the author’s meditations on the restorative powers of nature, even in the form of memory. With its emphasis on the dichotomy between sublime nature and urban living, this landmark of British Romantic poetry serves as a point of comparison to these artists’ intimate and often surreal explorations of outdoors and indoors, interiors and exteriors, nature and domesticity.