For Her First New York Solo Show, Antonia Showering Digs Into the ‘Messy Beauty’ of Life in Flux

In the Alice Neel – The waiting room (2025), Showering a naked woman on a bed with a baby tied to her to an umbilical cord. The woman’s eyes are knocked down. Her belly is still swollen. The baby, perhaps freshly born, or perhaps a symbol of the duties of parenthood that are in front of us, is washed in a chalk -like white. A group of people are in the distance through a window. “I knew the story I wanted to share,” she says. And telling through a painting would capture the emotional complexity in a way in which language could never. “There is a kind of slips that happens with words … we have all had different experiences, and when we hear an abstract word like intimacy or worryAlthough we know what the word means, we probably all feel it in a very different way. “

Showering had a clear idea from the start while making The waiting room. But other paintings need time to reveal themselves. For 5L (2024), she started her usual process of casting oil paint on a canvas that lay flat on the floor. After the paint was dried up and she stood up the canvas, she cycled through a series of revelations. Perhaps this is not a painting about parenthood, as she first thought. Perhaps the shape in the foreground is not a table, but a bed. “And then, with this SerendiPitous game, I discovered that the same figure is here” – she points to an orange orb of paint along the top, corresponding to the orange figure in the foreground – “completely unintentionally, such as energy or a soul escapes.” Her grandmother from mother’s side, a massively influential figure in her life who taught art history and came to each of the openings of showering, had recently passed away. “Maybe it was all unknowingly done and I wanted to see that, but maybe it wasn’t. Paint, especially oil paint, has this real magic.”

So here she is, becoming a caregiver and losing one: the two poles of life and death. “If you are confronted with that, it feels incredibly extraordinary, but in reality it is the life cycle, which is one of the most ordinary things.”