With colour washes that cause form to merge with form like a colourfield entropy – the natural move of all things towards decay, to oneness – Antonia Showering is a formidably capable painter and first on The A R T S E I S T’s young artists spotlights. A Slade School of Art MA graduate, Showering was a ‘Bloomberg Young Contemporaries’ in 2018. Combining muted colour washes with soft-edged graphic lines, her intimate scenes seem snatched directly from a memory, plucked through the gossamer membrane of time to be placed on a canvas still trailing their temporal vicera in the form of combining washes. Showering’s paintings are unexpectedly emotional and like most good art, they are full of tensions waiting to be resolved by the viewer. In their own quiet way, they give off a sense of nostalgia for a place and time not experienced.

 In a recent work, Crux (2019), a family looks up at a woman with her arms crossed. Their poses suggest familiarity with one another– a reclining man, a trio of closely-grouped woman in the background. But there is expectation in their poses, the central figure looks down at a child with her arms folded, waiting. Something is going to happen. The relaxation of the foregrounded man is difficult to reconcile with the central woman and child in the centre. The painting places us in a scene of simultaneous stress and comfort.  The colours are drawn from sun-bleached sepia photographs, but with hidden blues and turquoises and purples. The alien colours match in hue to the earthy tones and are surprisingly hidden from the eye. They camouflage themselves amongst the dusty browns, reds and yellows. In this, Showering creates a mild unease, almost to subtle to register. It dilutes the rosy-glow of nostalgia, adding complexity to what otherwise may have been nostalgic happiness is complex, perhaps beautifully sad.

In another work, Strangers (2018) a group of people sit along a dinner table. They sit close together, the colour washes of one figure blending into the form of another so that each figure partly constructs the figures beside it. Despite the title, the figures seem comfortable with one another. They transubstantiate in and out of existence – slow trickle movement of languid dinner, like honey falling from a tipped jar. Sickly greens and earthy reds dominate the canvas. The pallet, the title and the ephemeral figures create unease. It is the dinner table uncanny – almost normal, but with enough strangeness to create a mild sense of dread. A friendly dinner is made alien, like the strangers in the canvas.

Showering’s work is a link in the invisible chain of expressionist painters. Her washes may owe allegiance to the colour field Abstract Expressionists of the 60s – think Mark Rothko, Michael Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaller. Her pallets and loose representation shows influences of Neo-Expressionists like Peter Doig, Daniel Richter or Anselm Kiefer. But ultimately, despite influences and inherited traits, Showering’s work is her own. With quiet intimacy, her works explore an internal world of moments lost in time – like painterly snapshots from a family photographer. With diffused melancholy, Showering’s paintings elevate the mundane. Homely otherworldly colours, make the every-day alien, forcing a second, a third, a fourth look.

Written for and published as Young Artist Spotlight for The A R T S E I S T

All photos from Antonia Showering’s Instagram @antoniashowering