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 is 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.”

Antonia Showering, 5L, 2024.Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor.