Antonia Showering, We Stray, 2020. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.
Antonia Showering
My process is quite transient, in that imagery is constantly shifting, a couple embracing could become a mountain range, figures interlocking could later become the ripples in a lake.
— Antonia Showering
Creating rich narrative structures for her paintings to explore, Antonia Showering’s distinctive practice renders tangible the fleeting aspects of memory in compelling ways. With We Stray, the artist presents an idyllic mountain landscape with figures bathing and floating weightlessly across the still waters of a lake, bridging the personal and the universal in its treatment of memory, time, and the deep emotional connections that we forge with both people and places. At play here are the parallels between her practice and the workings of memory itself, the ways in which neither exist individually but are instead composites, added to and overlaid over time to create meaning, as felt impactfully by Showering’s use of the pentimento technique. Her figures can be seen as fading from or emerging into the scene, being remembered or forgotten, and their presence is a constituent element of the work’s fluidity. Like the movement of water, memory takes the shape of its vessel, and Showering’s embrace of the transient unfolds beautifully in the space between the concrete and the ephemeral.
After completing her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Arts in 2018, Antonia Showering has steadily gained critical attention, appearing in several group exhibitions and selected for a range of awards and residencies including Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2019, The Great Women Artists Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, in 2018, and the 2018 Henry Tonks Award. Having announced her representation by Timothy Taylor Gallery in 2021, Showering presented her first solo exhibition, Antonia Showering: Mixed Emotion, with the gallery in early 2022.
Caroline Walker, Afters, 2016. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.
Caroline Walker
[My paintings are] something you have to look through or past to get to the subject of the work […] like a voyeur I suppose, looking in on others’ lives. — Caroline Walker
Caroline Walker explores women in quiet moments of candid honesty, focusing on domestic or workplace environments and transforming them into studies in contemporary feminine interiority. Often these compositions contrast the unguarded subject with the framing device of their scenes, offering an intimate look at the nested dynamics of gender, labor, belonging, and the unseen human – and predominantly female – element of maintaining order. Strikingly cinematic in its sun-soaked palette and narrative power, Afters captures the tensions between public and private, ambiguity and the everyday that typifies Walker’s practice. Depicting a woman resting across an elegantly curved metal-framed sofa, a stiletto and watermelon slice casually discarded on the floor beside her, the atmosphere is languorous and intimate, Walker capturing a moment of stillness and solitude that falls between the day’s activities. Placing us in the position of the unseen observer, Walker’s awkwardly elevated perspectives and cropped angles create the impression of a fleeting glance or snapshot, as if we are witnessing the moment before the subject awakens and apologizes for sleeping on the couch.
Walker earned her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2009 has since been the subject of several solo exhibitions internationally, including Janey at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh in 2020, Women’s Work at the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham in 2021, and the forthcoming exhibition at K11 in Shanghai in November 2022. Walker’s latest solo show, Lisa, at Stephen Freidman Gallery presented a deeply intimate series of portraits documenting her sister-in-law’s journey through the first months of motherhood. Her works are included in a number of prominent public collections, including the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, The UK Government Art Collection, London, and Kunstmuseum in The Hague.
Flora Yukhnovich, Moi aussi je déborde, 2017. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London.
Flora Yukhnovich
There is something corporeal about paint […] the way a painterly gesture can talk about the physical experience of touch in a visceral way, breaking down the distance between the viewer and work.
—Flora Yukhnovich
Executed in 2017, the same year as her pivotal graduate show at City & Guilds London School of Art, Moi aussi je déborde is highly expressive of Flora Yukhnovich’s technical skill and immediately recognizable blend of Rococo aesthetics and contemporary cultural references. The work captures an important early moment in the development of her practice, reflecting the artist’s fluid approach to oil painting and conceptual depth as expressed through euphoric lightness. Capturing the fluctuations of the body, Yukhnovich’s gestural brushstrokes and obscured forms revitalize the drama and eroticism of the Rococo with a contemporary concern with contextualizing excess and frivolity on strictly feminist terms. At once celebrating and problematizing art historical representations of femininity, Moi aussi je déborde stages a reclamation of desire from the traditionally male gaze to a joyous recentering of the female perspective as the source of a new mythology. Among the waves of whites, pinks, and lavender tones, the angelic forms render themselves in new, self-determined configurations, recalling the words of Hélène Cixous as the viewer observes these “creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life.”
Following her first solo exhibition with Brocket Gallery, London, which included the present work, Yukhnovich has gone on to exhibit at Parafin, London, GASK, the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region, Czech Republic, the Jerwood Gallery Hastings, Blenheim Walk Gallery, and Leeds Arts University. Earlier in 2022, the artist presented her first solo exhibition at Victoria Miro in London, and is currently preparing for an exhibition of new works responding to the collection at The Ashmolean, Oxford, to be opened later this year.
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