Hier wohnt der Schweinepeitschenwurm, 2004–2014

Hier wohnt der Schweinepeitschenwurm is a two-part work created between 2004 and 2014. The artist does not remember how many overpaintings have taken place within this decade. It is a typical approach for Galli, representing a field of its own within her oeuvre. For a while, works stand in the studio, supposedly finished, until the artist takes them up again. Suddenly, something completely new emerges. The mushrooms, painted on the canvas with a white outline and comic-like gesture, refer to the extension of the house behind them. In terms of painting, the living space and shelter are not yet clearly formed into a mushroom dwelling, and associations with fairy tales are exposed. In this later phase, Galli resorts to a shrillness of color; the more dissonant the colors are in relation to each other, the more appealing they are to her. Fragmentary body figures are replaced by recognizable objects from external reality. Mushrooms, cups, houses, trees, or jugs appear, are distorted with painterly relish and sporadically brought to life. Despite the new pictoriality and formal language, the body remains her central theme. Its ambivalent image as a dwelling and shelter, but also as limitation and prison, is still in the foreground, but presents itself in a different manifestation in this phase. The second part of the work appears unusual, which in its playful colorfulness and repetitive figuration, tending almost towards the abstract, is reminiscent of many a Warhol flower print or Manfred Kuttner’s pop-colorful painting. Through a series of recurring breaks and resistances, the artist ultimately achieves an aesthetic balance. Galli tirelessly unites the seemingly irreconcilable. (Annabell Burger)