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.
In the Alice Neel–esque The Waiting Room (2025), Showering paints a nude woman on a bed with a baby tethered to her by an umbilical cord. The woman’s eyes are downcast, her belly still swollen. The baby, perhaps freshly born, or maybe a symbol of the duties of parenthood that lie ahead, is washed in a chalky white. Through a window a group of people stand in the distance. “I knew the story I wanted to share,” she says. And telling it through a painting would capture the emotional complexity in a way language never could. “There’s this kind of slippage that happens with words…we’ve all had different experiences, and when we hear an abstract word like intimacy or worry, even though we know what the word means, we all probably feel it in a very different way.”
Showering had a clear idea from the outset while making The Waiting Room. But other paintings take time to reveal themselves. For 5L (2024), she began with her usual process of pouring oil paint onto a canvas lying flat on the floor. After the paint dried and she stood the canvas upright, she cycled through a series of revelations. Maybe this isn’t a painting about parenthood, as she first thought. Maybe the shape in foreground isn’t a table, but a bed. “And then, with this serendipitous play, I found that the same figure is here”—she points to an orange orb of paint along the top, matching the orange figure in the foreground—“completely unintentional, like energy or a soul escaping.” Her maternal grandmother, a massively influential figure in her life who taught art history and came to each of Showering’s openings, had recently died. “Maybe it was all done subconsciously and I wanted to see that, but maybe it wasn’t. Paint, especially oil paint, has this real magic to it.”
So here she is, becoming a caregiver and losing one: the two poles of life and death. “When you’re facing that, it feels unbelievably extraordinary, but in reality, it is life’s cycle, which is one of the most ordinary things.”
Showering, born in London in 1991, traces her love of art back to childhood. She was taught to draw by her maternal grandfather, an architect. She studied at the City Guilds of London Art School and the Slade School of Art, where she earned her master’s in 2018. Since then, her career has been on a steep ascent. That same year she received the New Contemporaries x SPACE Studio Bursary Award, and she’s had solo shows at Timothy Taylor’s London location (2022) and White Cube (2020). She’s been in group shows at galleries including Whitechapel, Hauser Wirth, and Kasmin (curated by her good friend Katy Hessel). Her pieces are in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the British Museum.
Showering’s recent move from London to the bucolic countryside of Somerset, where she grew up, has been fruitful, focused. “The studio I’m in is so remote that the only sounds you hear are moos from escaped cows,” she says. It’s quite the contrast from her many years in London, where she could hear the turn of a neighbor’s newspaper through her studio walls, and where “every corner started to feel like a graveyard of memories.”
Much of her childhood was also spent in her grandmother’s hometown in Switzerland, a place she still visits often. Showering has long included references to the village’s dramatic landscape. “Those mountains have always acted as an anchor. Each time I’ve returned, the inevitable changes of life happen, whereas they don’t change.” In preparing for her Studio School lecture, she found old sketchbooks that showed her playing with the same ideas—family, relationships—set against the same backdrop—those Swiss mountains. She was maybe 10 years old when she made them.
“In Line” is a show of “looking at life in all its sort of messy beauty,” Showering says. It has the Surrealist tinges and personal symbolism of past work, but she’s gone deeper here, leaning into the intensity of this chapter. “I’ve definitely been trying to slow down time and make sense of specific moments or feelings that I know are universal.” Longing, grief, serenity, love—these are deeply human emotions, and ones particularly suited to Showering’s psychologically-charged style. Her art looks the way trying to describe a dream feels. Details that were vivid just moments ago are now blurry, illegible, buried beneath the layers. But maybe that’s the point. Some things are clearer out of focus.
“Antonia Showering: In Line” is on view at Timothy Taylor in New York City from May 8 to June 21, 2025.