GALLI

The artist Galli was born in Heusweiler in the German state of Saarland in 1944. After completing her basic apprenticeship at the Werkkunstschule in Saarbrücken with Oscar Holweck, she moved to Berlin in 1969 where she studied under the Dutch artist and graphic designer Martin Engelmann, who was associated with the Cobra artist group, and later became his master student. Galli’s arrival to Berlin coincided with the uprisings of the German Student Movement, in which political provocation, awakening, and upheaval expanded beyond the universities. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Neue Wilde movement developed in Germany and Austria, a neo-expressive group mainly dominated by men, to which Galli is often assigned but from which she consciously distanced herself from in her painting. Galli worked apart from the grouping in her adopted home city of Berlin, known as the Moritzboys, whose work primarily focused on the city’s nightlife, contemporary scenes, and the punk and wave movements there. Galli’s work draws on far more general, universal themes from literature, language, art history, mythology, and religion. Occasionally, she appropriates word fragments from fleeting conversations or radio broadcasts. Her explorations of existential and bodily experiences interweave the domestic and the mundane, the everyday and the mythological, the banal and the fantastic, all within the realm of her untamed imagination.

The exhibition, curated by Annabell Burger, includes about fifty works created between 1985 and 2015. Among them are rarely shown artists’ books and drawings, as well as paintings from Galli’s most productive years. The show deliberately underscores the narrative character and graphic quality in the artist's work through thematic placement within five major groups of works. Galli’s allegorical explorations of existential, emotional, and experiential spaces are characterized by spontaneous drawing and painting, as well as expressive use of color. Important to Burger were the approximately eighty drawings on index cards, the front and back of which are presented simultaneously for the first time and provide insight into the major themes of Galli’s oeuvre.

In addition to paintings, drawings, and collages, the artist has also produced numerous artist’s books over the years. The books, densely filled with drawings, are often worked on with scissors and are characterized by hurried gestures and tireless patience, reminiscent of visual diaries. Although not directly intended as studies for her paintings, the books reveal a pronounced interest in narrative, composition, and language, providing insight into the motivic cosmos of her large-format works. Ambivalence runs like a red thread through the entire body of work: damage, dependency, fears, pleasure, burden, grief, shame, dreams, trauma. Early on, Galli developed a style of painting that conveys messages of a life of pain and is characterized by uncertainty about the human condition. She skillfully and continually incorporates art-historical references which simultaneously bringing her figures into contemporary artistic and social contexts.

The body as a bearer of identity is repeatedly reexamined in Galli’s painting. In compositions that include the body, amorphous figures are depicted, sometimes only as fragments, and at times supplemented or even completely replaced by everyday objects. Mushrooms, cups, houses, trees, and jugs are brought to life in a painterly isolated form. Despite the inventive imagery and formal language, the body remains her central theme. Its ambivalent image as a dwelling and shelter, as well as a limitation and prison, is still at the forefront—perhaps as an artistic corrective to social thinking, fostering an acceptance of otherness.