Pennungal: Lives of Women and Girls by Sosa Joseph; David Zwirner Gallery; August 30th - September 28th
David Zwirner is pleased to present Pennungal: Lives of women and girls, an exhibition of new paintings by Indian artist Sosa Joseph, at the gallery’s London location. A masterful colourist and storyteller, Joseph creates atmospheric paintings marked by a striking visual and psychological complexity, in which figures from her South Indian family and milieu mingle with open-ended motifs from the natural world. Her work 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. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in Europe.
Begun in 2023, the body of work featured in Pennungal—a vernacular Malayalam term for “women”—is among Joseph’s most directly autobiographical. The paintings in this exhibition reflect on Joseph’s experiences and observations of the treatment of women and girls from her hometown of Parumala, an island village situated on the Pamba River in the South Indian state of Kerala, where the artist lived until the age of twenty-four. In her notable 2012 painting series What are we? (a major example of which is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Joseph illustrated the lives of women from her current neighbourhood in Kochi.
With this new body of work, the artist looks back at her formative early years, examining the societal and structural limitations that have long been imposed upon the women of her original hometown.
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