Haley Josephs, 'Love of Waters' at Almine Rech: A Painter's Read on Hanging Light Itself

♦ ♦ ♦ JULY 03, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Haley Josephs, 'Love of Waters' at Almine Rech: A Painter's Read on Hanging Light Itself At a Glance Nearby-only — worth a deliberate stop if you're already downtown: nine oil paintings about reflected light, where the room's own light is the thing most likely to ruin them. Walk in and the first thing the paintings do is throw light back at the room. The nine oil works in Haley Josephs’ “Love of Waters,” her first US show with Almine Rech (361 Broadway, June 26 to July 31), are almost all built around one subject: the glitter of light on moving water. Her own statement for the show says it plainly: “I’ve been watching the water the way light reflects off its surface, shining and glistening… I see the sparkling light dancing on the surface as a space which holds the hopes and dreams of all humankind.” Painted glitter, a whole room of it. That’s a lovely idea and a genuinely hard installation problem, which is the part the previews skip. Why a show about reflected light is the hardest thing in the room to light Here’s the trap. A painting of shimmering water is, physically, a surface covered in small high-value marks meant to read as sparkle. Hang that under a hard directional gallery spot and the varnish and wet-looking oil throw a second, real glare straight back, actual specular bounce sitting on top of the painted kind. The eye can’t separate them. The depicted sparkle and the room’s reflection blur into one hot smear, and the painting’s whole subject, that dancing surface light, drowns in the light the room added. So a show like this wants the opposite of drama: flat frontal light, even across the surface and kept off it at any raking angle, so the only glitter in the room is the glitter Josephs painted. Whether a gallery gets that right is the difference between the work singing and the work glaring. It is the first thing to read walking in. A painting about light can’t be lit like one about shadow. What a six-foot canvas and a seven-inch panel ask of the same wall The checklist has a second tell: scale. The show runs from “Driftwood Bows to the Sea” (2026, oil on linen, 182.9 x 121.9 cm), nearly six feet tall, down to “DUCK” (2025, oil on panel, 17.8 x 12.7 cm), barely seven inches across. That is an enormous spread for nine works. A near-six-foot canvas resolves at throwback distance and holds a broad wall on its own. A seven-inch panel does the reverse: it pulls the body in to arm’s length and dies on a big empty expanse, read as an afterthought beside its larger neighbors. A show with this range only works if the small panels are given their own intimate pockets of wall, a narrow pier, a low confidential hang, somewhere the room goes quiet and close. Scatter them next to the six-footers and half the show disappears. Verdict: nearby-only. It’s a modest summer solo, nine works, several of them tiny, but the reflected-light idea is the kind of thing that collapses in a phone photo (a thumbnail of painted glit