Artists

Galli

Press release

Opening Event: Thurs 06 Feb, 6-9PM

‘The body as a battlefield – that applies to everyone.’ Galli, 2015

So, So, So marks the first UK solo exhibition of artist Galli (b.1944, Germany). 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), at brunand brunand gallery (2021), and in Unruly Bodies, a group show at Goldsmiths CCA (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, her short stature went luckily unnoticed during her infancy under Nazi rule. 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.