Love of Waters — Haley Josephs

Almine Rech New York is pleased to present ’Love of Waters’, Haley Josephs’ third solo exhibition with the gallery –and her first with Almine Rech in the United States– on view from June 26 to July 31, 2026.

I’ve been watching the water the way light reflects off its surface, shining and glistening. When we cry, our tears return to it. Sweat, piss, saliva—every kind of excretion—flows back to its source. They are pieces of us, becoming one again, carried onward. I see the sparkling light dancing on the surface as a space which holds the hopes and dreams of all humankind, gathering and pulling them together, Into prisms of rainbow light. Think of that when you look at water.

— Haley Josephs

About the artist

Haley Josephs is an American painter based in Rhode Island and Maine. In 2014 she graduated from Yale University with an MFA in Painting & Printmaking.

Drawing inspiration from notions of transformation and mortality, Josephs depicts solitary figures in fantastical yet foreboding environments that transcend time and space. Her enigmatic work embraces contradiction: the real and the imagined, dreaming and waking, memory and the present.

Vivid color and an intuitive process guide her paintings, giving visual language to otherwise intangible emotions and sensations. Josephs’ palette, imagery, and brushwork converge to create richly symbolic works that delve into the complexity of consciousness. Figures and landscapes become intertwined with the oneiric and the psyche, revealing a distinctive intimacy. A recurring character within Josephs’ work is the artist’s late sister, who is often evoked in bold, daring, portraits that amalgamate intimate and personal narratives of the artist with the universal human condition.

Josephs’ enigmatic paintings are colorful, even whimsical, yet often contain a certain amount of darkness. A desire to explore themes of power and balance pervades her work, hinting a moment of liberation from one’s ostensibly everlasting psychological conflicts.