Galli - See How You Get On

Sometimes it takes decades for the boldness of a work to be truly appreciated. This is the case with Galli's paintings, drawings, texts, and the vast collection of self-made books she has produced from the 1980s to the present day. Galli's self-chosen name alone signals turmoil, hubbub, halligalli. There is something poetic and anarchic in her work that yearns to explore the unknown.

Born in Saarland in 1944, Galli is not only a visual artist but also a writer, caricaturist, chronicler, listener, Dadaist, captivating storyteller—and above all an anarchist troublemaker. “See How You Get On” is the somewhat sardonic title chosen by curator Annabell Burger, who organized the exhibition at the PalaisPopulaire in collaboration with the Derneburg Castle Art Museum. Following presentations by Marc Brandenburg and K. H. Hödicke, this show continues a series of exhibitions featuring artists with a special connection to Berlin and the Deutsche Bank Collection.

Galli's impetuous, even expressive painting style emerged alongside the rise of the Neue Wilde in the 1980s. Since then, she has been described as a fringe phenomenon of this movement, which has unduly narrowed the perception of her work. While artists like Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, and Salomé drew inspiration from the punk and wave scene and German Expressionism in squatted Kreuzberg, Galli's practice is primarily shaped by literature, language, and poetry. She lives and works away from the scene in bourgeois Friedenau, a literary West Berlin neighborhood that was home to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, and Max Frisch, and where Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller still resides. Galli was friends with German-Romanian poet Oskar Pastior and collaborated with him. In this environment, like Louise Bourgeois and Maria Lassnig, Galli developed a completely idiosyncratic, feminist, extremely physical art that delves into personal and collective abysses.

Ambivalences run like a red thread through Gallie’s entire body of work: damage, dependencies, fears, lust, burden, grief, shame, dreams, and traumas. Her paintings are populated by monsters in the truest sense of the word. They dwell in forests and dreams, inhabit or occupy strangely empty houses and bare rooms. Sometimes only arms, legs, hooves, hands, and claws are visible. Their bodies appear as if they have grown together from the remains or pieces of various animal, human, or mythological beings. It seems as if all these parts are tugging at each other, wanting to go somewhere else—away from or towards each other—dancing ecstatically, fighting, or loving each other so intensely that they almost burst the confines of the picture.

Due to Galli's short stature, it has long been assumed that her deformed, wounded figures must represent the physical experience of people with dwarfism or disabilities. However, she states: ““That’s understandable, but it’s too narrow-minded to solely emphasize short stature. The body as a battleground impacts everyone.” Her work goes deeper: it's about breaking free from conventional, homogeneous perceptions—from norms, conventions, repetitive narratives, and the legacy of German history into which she was born in the final years of World War II. Galli's art opposes patriarchal authority, revolts against the repressed Nazi past and bourgeois stuffiness, and rebels against identities defined by nation, skin color, sexuality, or ideology. Her artistic practice is impulsive and intuitive, yet constantly reflective—a formulation between text, sign, and image. "I’ve always been interested in literary material that flows into the image: Dada poetry, ballads, the Old Testament,” she explains. Radio snippets or overheard sentences can trigger images of bodies, spaces, and landscapes in her work. Galli doesn't dominate or control her painting but allows it to unfold, reacting with further painterly and compositional decisions, which are then repeatedly overturned. She describes her process: “It's crucial to draw from chaos, to develop something from it. It's about chaos, sorting, chaos, sorting." This represents a dialectic process between intuition and control.

A few strokes suffice, as in "Langes Bild" (1985-87), to create painterly spaces—linguistic and emotional realms that remain intentionally vague, open to interpretation. Galli's figures contain elements of galactic black holes, cephalopods, and protozoa, as well as ancient myths, Catholicism, fragments of talk show conversations, the historical violence of modernity, and the hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. Nothing is deemed important or unimportant; everything is uncertain. Galli's paintings appear astonishingly contemporary today, partly due to their non-binary nature. They don't take up simple positions or seek to belong anywhere specific. You can't tell whether a man or a woman painted them. Her art is truly sensational, without pathos, modest. Simultaneously, it engages with a very contemporary, non-hierarchical view of the relationship between civilization and nature, and our concept of identity. It advocates for the “foreign”—everything that is out of line, that doesn't conform to our increasingly dubious norms.

Therefore, Galli's work should not be seen merely as the next rediscovery or a missing link, but as a current, relevant position. It seems tailor-made for this ghostly turning point, the uncertainty in which we currently find ourselves.