Diane Chappalley and Antonia Showering: The present is already gone

About

Diane Chappalley and Antonia Showering present a joint painting exhibition at Chalton Gallery. Both artists cultivate the generative feeling of experience through the process of painting. Their works put forward the manipulation of paint and its possibilities while investigating personal histories. The paintings emerge from introspection and become a place where the past is reimagined.

Chappalley's paintings arise from sensory experiences: the synthesis and stimulation of new and past perceptions. The motifs of trees, houses, ducks and trains are used to recreate a space that was once known. Her practice is a continual search in the making; a search guided to reach a sense of familiarity, but one that is not quite possible to pin down. While Chappalley's paintings invite us into an intimate space deprived of the human figure, Showering's paintings are often inhabited.

The people depicted in Showering's half remembered, half imagined landscapes are often family members. Showering's practice blends how she sees the person on the surface with how she views them on an emotional level. She uses the technique of pentimento by layering recollections to try and capture the ephemeral nature of memory.

Both artists use motifs derived from their roots in Switzerland. Coincidently, not only is their heritage in tandem but also their art education; City and Guilds of London Art School followed by the Slade School of Fine Art. The present is already gone emerged from these affiliations, combining their shared interests of landscape and memory continuing their painterly dialogue.