Isabel Sullivan Gallery is pleased to present Seashells in my mother’s garden and the giant boulder rolling down, the first U.S. solo exhibition by Portuguese artist Joana Galego. Featuring eight paintings and three works on paper, the show opens April 24 at 39 Lispenard Street in New York and runs through May 31st. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 24, from 6–8 pm.

This collection of works combines memories from the artist’s childhood, her first years living in London as a young adult, the residency she completed in Wonosalam, Indonesia in 2023, and the times she and her mother planted trees in the garden that once belonged to her grandmother in Parede, Portugal. Fragments of these memories become tactile and spiritually rich landscapes—tender, vivid, and deeply personal.

The show’s title is a nod to the final line of Albert Camus’ The myth of Sisyphus, a recurring reference in conversations with Galego’s father. Like Sisyphus, who finds dignity in his eternal task, Galego’s painting practice is a quiet rebellion against impermanence. “To draw and to paint,” she says, “is my way of trying to honor some of the value in carrying the absurd boulder all the way up the hill.”

Figures often appear mid-departure, exiting the frame or suspended between places. The paintings echo the sensation of being only temporarily somewhere, inhabiting a foreign country, a memory, a moment of connection. It also represents the presence of those who are no longer there. In Lost by choice, together, a solitary figure walks barefoot across large stones in a body of water. The figure crosses in front of a red forest—a threshold between the physical and the metaphysical.

In East Java, the waterfalls, mountains, and boulders there resurrected an affectionate memory from Galego’s childhood, of a massive boulder in Parque Nacional Peneda-Gerês in Northern Portugal. The awe that Galego experienced in Indonesia and Portugal, is a feeling many artists have harnessed to experience transcendence and wonder. Galego uses both nature and her relationships to other people as a source of awe. “Through these paintings, 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.”