Joana Galego: Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down

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Joana Galego: Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down

Joana Galego: Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down
24th April, 2025 – 31st May, 2025
Isabel Sullivan Gallery
39 Lispenard St
New York, NY 10013

Isabel Sullivan Gallery will present Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down, the first solo exhibition in the United States by Portuguese artist Joana Galego. Opening on 24 April at 39 Lispenard Street in Tribeca, New York, the exhibition features eight paintings and three works on paper, and will remain on view through 31 May. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, 24 April, from 6 to 8pm.

Joana Galego: Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down
Personal Collections
Joana Galego
Image courtesy of Isabel Sullivan Gallery

The exhibition brings together a series of deeply personal works shaped by the artist’s childhood in Portugal, her early adulthood in London, and a 2023 residency in Wonosalam, Indonesia. Also present are memories of planting trees alongside her mother in the garden that once belonged to her grandmother in Parede. These layered recollections emerge in the form of lyrical, emotionally charged landscapes—at once intimate and expansive.

The title of the exhibition refers to the final line of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, a text that has long featured in conversations between Galego and her father. Like the myth’s central figure, whose task is endless and solitary, Galego’s painting is an act of quiet persistence. “To draw and to paint,” she says, “is my way of trying to honour some of the value in carrying the absurd boulder all the way up the hill.”

Joana Galego: Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down
Planting Our Tree at the End of the World
Joana Galego
Image courtesy of Isabel Sullivan Gallery

Many of her figures are caught in transition—moving away, pausing before disappearing, or lingering on the edge of the scene. In Lost By Choice, Together, a lone figure crosses a body of water barefoot, stepping carefully across large stones. A red forest stands behind them like a memory—vivid, unknowable, and just out of reach.

During her time in East Java, Galego was struck by the waterfalls, boulders and mountains around her, which stirred an affectionate recollection of a massive rock from her childhood in northern Portugal’s Peneda-Gerês National Park. Her response to the landscape is less observational than emotional; it becomes a vessel for memory and wonder.

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Joana Galego: Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down
Lost By Choice, Together
Joana Galego

Galego’s reverence for nature is matched by her attentiveness to human connection. Her work considers not only what we remember, but how we attempt to reach one another across time and distance. “Through these paintings,” Galego says, “I tried to tackle that aspect of life which seems so important to me—that it can be alright not to understand each other fully, while tirelessly and hopefully still trying to do so.”

Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down offers no single narrative. Rather, it unfolds as a series of meditations—on loss, movement, devotion, and the quiet traces that remain.

Joana Galego: Seashells in My Mother’s Garden and The Giant Boulder Rolling Down opens on the 24th of April, 2025 until the 31st of May, 2025 at Isabel Sullivan Gallery

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