So, So, So marks the first UK solo exhibition of artist Galli (b.1944, Germany).
‘The body as a battlefield - that applies to everyone’. - Galli, 2015
Spanning painting, books, collages, and drawings, the exhibition includes works from across her decades long practice. After initial commercial success in the 1980s, Galli’s work was little exhibited, but has rightly gained increasing attention in recent years, with work included in the Berlin Biennale (2020), brunand brunand (2021) gallery, and in Unruly Bodies, a group show at Goldsmiths CCA in 2023, amongst others. Galli’s work is a powerful current position on corporeality in a fractious and violent age that proposes an exhilarating, ribald, and haunting grammar of the body. The exhibition’s title – So, So, So – refers to the melodic cadence of the artist’s speech, and, in both English and German, gestures to openness, something to come, and excess.
Galli was born Anna-Gabriele Müller in Saarbrücken. Born at the end of the Second World War, She initially trained under painters of the Cobra movement, who emphasized an aesthetic break with Western ideals, naturalism, and abstraction. In 1969 she moved to West Berlin to further her studies under painter and graphic artist Martin Engelmann, whose work references Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel and Surrealism. In the 1970s, West Berlin was a city at a turning point, moving away from the hangovers of Nazi fascism and post-war depression, to increasing freedoms, blossoming into an avant-garde scene of squatting, punk music, and feminist and queer civil rights movements. The body as a battlefield was central to these shifts, an arena Galli’s blistering work enters.
Galli’s work is freely expressive, instinctive, guttural, and gestural, but as an artist she is governed by strong discipline. Even today, despite severe health and mobility restrictions, she draws daily. The exhibition includes a wide array of drawings, selected to demonstrate the movement of figures and forms through different iterations. Galli draws rapidly, so each has a palpable immediacy, but their chain of evolution evidences a long-time span of deciphering and translation into new compositions that modulate figures, shapes and intensities.
Paintings have also been selected from the 1980s to 2000s. Some are part of series that used a particular formal device, such as the paravent folding screen, or that were made during a specific period, such as her residency in Florence in 1990. Often made at a large scale, they are incredibly physical works, that bear the traces of their making. Later pieces concentrate more closely on domestic space, so that figures grow out of washing machines, or objects speak to one another in claustrophobic boxed-in spaces. Here a sense of home becomes ambivalent, as a safe enclosure, but also an unbearable pressure chamber that swallows the body and erodes the division between object and subject.
GALLI: So, So, So: 07 Feb–04 May 2025
GOLDSMITHS CCA, St James’, New Cross, London SE14 6AD
Further Information: Goldsmiths CCA — GALLI