Sosa Joseph: Rain over the river

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Indian artist Sosa Joseph (b. 1971) at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York. This will be the artist’s first show in North America, and it follows Pennungal: Lives of women and girls, her 2024 solo presentation at David Zwirner London. A masterful colorist and storyteller, Joseph creates atmospheric paintings marked by a striking visual and psychological complexity. Her oeuvre offers an alternative approach to the artistic tradition of history painting—one in which everyday moments take on the heft of the extraordinary and individual recollections coalesce into a richly tapestried communal history. Quasi-autobiographical yet tantalizingly evocative and open-ended, the paintings in Rain over the river will reflect on the particularities of life in Parumala, an island village situated on the Pamba River in the South Indian state of Kerala, where the artist spent the first twenty-four years of her life. In these works, Joseph will delve into the human struggle for survival that animates this riverine world, exploring its capacity for fear, precarity, wonder, and beauty.