Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg is pleased to announce an exhibition by the German artist Galli curated by Annabell Burger. Featuring approximately fifty works made between 1985-2015, the show includes rarely exhibited artist books and drawings alongside paintings from Galli’s most productive years. Conceived by Burger in a loosely chronicle form, the exhibition deliberately emphasizes the narrative character and graphic quality of Galli’s work through thematic placement within five major groups. The presence of graphic and painterly spontaneity and expressive color guides us through Galli's allegorical explorations of existential and physical experience. Burger has also selected approximately eighty index card drawings to be shown front and verso for the first time, offering a detailed insight into the most important themes within Galli’s work.

Galli was born in Saarland, West Germany in 1944, and moved to Berlin to study art in 1969. In the early 1980s, the Neue Wilden movement developed in Germany and Austria, a mainly male-dominated grouping to which Galli likes to be assigned, but from which she consciously distanced herself in her painting. Galli’s work relied on broader universal themes derived from literature, art history, mythology, and religion, and sporadic appropriation of word fragments. Her investigations into existential and corporeal experience intertwine the domestic and mundane, everyday and mythological, and the banal and the fantastic of her untamed imagination. In paintings like Langes Bild (1985-87) and o.T. (750 Jahre Galerie Nothelfer) (1988) bursts of color reverberate within graphic lines to underscore intimate moments which are also bold, combative and sarcastically humorous. In the painting Kentaur (für Schari!) (1990), a lone human-horse with multiple limbs grapples physically and psychologically with itself, and draws inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Alongside the development of her paintings, Galli has always engaged with handmade artist books. Filled with labor-intensive drawings, often meticulously dissected with scissors and defined by heavy mark making and hurried gestures, the books are reminiscent of visual diaries. While not intended as studies for her paintings, the books illustrate a keen interest in narrative, composition, and linguistics, and offer an essential insight to her larger format compositions. In books like o.T. (Freisenmesterbericht) (1998-2002), the artist creates an adventurous journey through a mushroom-filled landscape. The book appears twice in the exhibition – in its original form, and in a video in which Galli flips through the pages of her imagined world.

Issues of scale and dwelling as they relate to body and shelter run like a thread through Galli’s work. Her paintings are inspired by both consciousness and the unconcious. Galli’s world of hybrid beings includes the recognizeable objects of external reality, which she gleefully distorts and brings to life – anthropomorphic houses, cups, tables, pots, trees. The work ultimately references the interchangeability of shell and of the body, which presents itself in her painting in varying manifestions and diverse metamorpheses - perhaps as an artistic corrective to social thinking, to allow otherness.

Galli (b. 1944, Saarland) studied painting at the Saarland Art School in Saarbrücken, and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin (today UDK) in 1969. She received the Will Grohmann Prize in 1989, and the Albert Weisgerber Prize, 2003. From 1992 to 2005, she taught at the FH Münster. Recent exhibitions include Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (2023) (current); Goldsmiths CCA, London (groupshow, 2023); Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid (solo, 2023); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (solo, 2022); Spaced Out, Gut Kerkow (solo, 2022); brunand brunand, Berlin (solo, 2021); and the 11^th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, KW, Berlin (2020). Earlier solo presentations include Museum St. Ingbert (2004); Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken (1992); Villa Romana, Florence (1990); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (1989); Städtisches Bodensee-Museum, Friedrichshafen (1985); Galerie der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin (1981); Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin (1980); and Modersohn-Becker-Haus, Bremen (1978).

For more information and images, please contact the Hall Art Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.