A distinct shift in bodily and spatial awareness often emerges after a woman becomes a mother. As both a painter and a new mother, British artist Antonia Showering seems to have fully channeled this heightened sensorial and emotional consciousness into her latest body of work, on view in her New York debut at Timothy Taylor.
In these paintings, her lush, atmospheric layering of oil paint gives rise to emotionally charged yet symbolically ambiguous compositions, where seemingly abstract or indistinct figures drift through diaphanous, vaporous and, at times, verdant natural backdrops—almost merging with their surroundings. Showering also recently relocated to the Somerset countryside, rediscovering a deeper connection to natural forces and the rhythms of life that pulse through the canvases in the exhibition.
Yet the narrative remains deliberately unresolved, preserving a sense of mystery that unfolds on the canvas, carried by the continual transformation of fluid pools of paint, already evoking the fleeting nature of all sensorial and emotional experience. Blending internal sensation with memory in a seamless, intuitive translation, Showering appears to reach beyond figuration, probing the psychological strata that underpin perception. “Painting is a visual language; words sometimes scare me in the way they feel so permanent and quotable,” Showering tells Observer when we catch up to reflect on this new body of work and her distinctive approach to painting. “A painting can say many things without using a single word.”
She says her canvases often contain secret motifs loaded with personal symbolism, yet she leaves them open, inviting viewers to navigate the dense layering of meaning and visual clues, guided by the seductive rhythm of the painting’s tides. “I enjoy how others interpret this imagery and rarely feel the need to explain what it originally meant to me,” she says. “Sometimes I even find hearing how other people read the work can teach me something about the interior worlds found in my paintings.”
Showering’s use of unreal colors points toward something more symbolic and internal: an emotional register that seems to emerge at the raw, pre-linguistic level of experience. Her canvases often feel like the first primal translation of an event, before any naming or codification occurs, and she usually approaches a painting with only a loose sense of the mood or atmosphere she wants to convey and an intuitive feeling that shapes her initial color choices and sets the tone of the palette. “The idea of converting a transient feeling into something concrete, with paint, really excites me,” she notes. “Being able to lock something ephemeral onto a 2D surface and then share this with others almost feels like magic to me.”
Fittingly, her approach is unbound by graphic structure or premeditated form. Showering instead approaches the canvas instinctively and spontaneously, letting color lead with immediate, bodily logic. “I see the process as a dance, but ultimately it’s all decision making. Sometimes they feel like half decisions, especially when they’re made late at night,” she says—describing how structure might come from chance, from finding a child’s toy in her pocket or half-closing her eyes and waiting for something figurative to surface from the brushstrokes. Her process involves constant movement in and out of the image, adding, erasing, layering and removing in a rhythm that mirrors how we internally shape experience into memory and meaning.
“I think I spend as much time removing paint from the canvas as adding it. I’m always asking myself, ‘Should this stay? Should I rub it back? How do these colors vibrate off each other?’” she says. “You’re led by your gut most of the time, and there isn’t a much better feeling than when you stand back from the canvas and the actual physicality of the paint is igniting something inside of you.” When she feels trapped within an image, she pours turpentine-thinned paint across the surface. “This opens up the image and often leads the composition to a more charged version of what I was touching on initially.”
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Liberated from any premeditation of a descriptive or narrative purpose, the spontaneous performance of mark-making that Showering enacts closely mimics both our cognitive and emotional processes of meaning-making, which becomes a cathartic ritual of elaborating her own experience that allows her to find, within painting, something universal. “It’s really important to me that there’s a certain amount of universality in my work,” she clarifies. “The inspiration may be drawn from feelings I have experienced; however, I don’t want to give the figures too much specificity. Otherwise, there’s no space for others to imagine themselves in the scenes.”
At the heart of this body of work is a profoundly intimate yet universally resonant exploration of the intergenerational nature of affection—emotional connections that stretch across ages, time and space. Moments of tenderness and care unfold within warm, bucolic landscapes, grounding them in emotional geography. Here, the artist seems to explore a secret emotional language of minimal gestures, as she revives both vivid, recent memories and more distant, fading ones in painting.
It has been nearly three and a half years since her last solo show in January 2022, and life in the meantime has been emotionally profound. “There have been lots of cycles in this time,” Showering says. “People leaving us, new people arriving, relationships starting and relationships ending,” she notes. “Becoming a mother and losing my remaining grandparents in the space of a short amount of time meant I was thinking a lot about life’s unrelenting march and moving along on life’s conveyor belt to the next stage.”
Motherhood occupies a central place in this series. In several works, the artist engages in a process of both embodiment and disembodiment—translating the visceral, physical and emotional realities of becoming and being a mother, while tracing how those reverberations extend outward: toward her child, her partner and the world around her. In The Waiting Room, for instance, Showering seeks to express the vulnerability of mother and child in the postpartum moment, and their shared need for healing: a woman reclines on a bed, still tense and uneasy, her belly full with pregnancy. A pale infant lies at her side, viscerally tethered to her by an umbilical cord—a reference not only to the mother’s nurturing role but to the eternal bond that will link them for life.
Secret Language, by contrast, emerged from a passing remark during a phone call, Showering recalls, in which she said to a friend, “You try painting a picture with a baby on your hip.” Not that she’s done that, she clarifies, “but the image of it was imprinted in my mind.” The result is a powerful portrayal of the intimate, visceral link between mother and child that also gestures toward the parallel acts of artistic creation and birth.
As Showering introduces more personal elements that inspired these works, we begin to read them as emotional topography. Through painting, she explores how memories are mapped onto spaces, textures and atmospheres to restore and revive deeper familial and ancestral ties, now made more resonant by the fact that she has become a conduit for the family’s future.
These reflections also gave rise to the show’s title, In Line. As she shares during our conversation, her Swiss grandmother played a significant role in her early introduction to art, and the exhibition at Timothy Taylor is her first since her grandmother’s passing. Yet her presence, Showering notes, runs through many of the works, particularly the more densely narrative canvases like 5L, I Ching and After Life. “With such a long time between my last show, I sort of started to forget that the work was going to be seen by the world, and as a result the works are more vulnerable,” she reflects. “I’ve been thinking about life’s messy beauty and the pockets of joy that can be found during challenging times,” she adds. “I’ve been thinking about how I can use paint to translate the feeling of someone you love’s soft hair under your chin when you’re puzzle-pieced together versus wanting to create a landscape for souls to reunite.”
Ultimately, in this show, Showering found in the imaginative, time- and space-transcending dimension of painting a portal of reconnection where past and present bleed into one another and the intimate becomes universal. As pigments sediment with memories on the canvas, Showering revives and restores the thread of meaning that ties personal life events to the universal fate of humanity, through the vulnerability and vast multiplicity of our individual stories and life paths.
Antonia Showering’s “In Line” is at Timothy Taylor in New York, through June 21, 2025.
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