For Her First New York Solo Show, Antonia Showering Digs Into the ‘Messy Beauty' of Life in Flux
The word pentimento comes from the Italian pentirsi, which means to repent. As an art technique it refers to the faint trace of a previous composition in an artwork, the result of a revision made to cover something up. Picasso left whispers of a woman's face behind the main figure in The Old Guitarist. John Singer Sargent repainted a shoulder strap on his famous Madame X portrait after its original placement—slipping down the right arm—caused a stir at the 1884 Salon in Paris.
While pentimento may be used as an occasional tool to reverse a mistake or change course, it's more of a core principle for the British artist Antonia Showering. She stacks loose depictions of people and places—some real, some imagined—upon one another. Figures turn into mountains; clear outlines become muddied. Perhaps she'll douse the whole thing in a wash of ochre or green and start again. The leftover bits of earlier decisions are not accidents but building blocks, 'evidence of the journey that led me to the finished piece,' as she put it during a lecture at the New York Studio School last month.
Ghostly layers of shapes and colors are well-suited to Showering's main subjects: time and memory. Life's big moments of bliss and sorrow are not unlike underpaintings, getting fuzzier as time marches on but never fully melting away.
In the last three years, Showering has had no shortage of such big moments—the birth of her child, a breakup, the loss of two grandmothers, a move from London to rural Somerset. 'It's been a really charged time in terms of rotation within the family, and seeing everybody inevitably bump up in life's conveyor belt,' Showering tells me as we settle into a sunlit room at Timothy Taylor gallery in Tribeca, where her new solo show, 'In Line,' opens May 8. This new solo exhibition—her first in the United States, her first as a mother, and her most vulnerable yet—features 13 oil paintings Showering made during this intense period of change.
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