LONDON — “The body as a battleground — that applies to everyone,” writes Galli. This statement, quoted in the exhibition text for the solo exhibition So, So, So at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, is indicative of the artist’s approach to painting — and to life. Most of the paintings in the exhibition date from the 1980s and ’90s, building on the emerging avant-garde countercultures in West Berlin and the centrality of the body to growing movements advocating for feminist, queer, and disability rights. Galli was born notably small for her age at the end of the Second World War, which luckily went unnoticed by Nazi officials who targeted those with physical anomalies. It is tempting to read her images of curtailed torsos, reaching limbs, and hybrid features as a response to her own experience, but this would be reductive. These paintings speak to the universality of experiencing the body as a site of contestation and politicization.
Many of the works are simultaneously violent and sensual, using a sparse but complex visual language that refuses to yield to the viewer’s analytic eye too easily. In “o.T., (750 Jahre Galerie Nothelfer)” (1988), for instance, deformed bodies appear to be dancing, perhaps in joy. One pair of short-fingered hands cradles a yellow heart while another brandishes a blue knife. Simple brushstrokes hint at orifices and sexualization, while the sparse application of primary colors is almost childish, suggesting an innocence belied by the potential of violence.
Galli’s ambiguous figures exist in a continual state of metamorphosis between formation and deformation. Alongside paintings, the exhibition includes drawings on A4 paper, artist books, and index card pictures, capturing a plethora of fantastical bodies and folkloric characters. Many of these defy conventional exhibition conditions; for instance, the index card works are all double-sided, and will be flipped halfway through the exhibition, creating an alternative narrative arc.
While many of the works in the opening rooms of the exhibition appear to draw on literary or mythological sources, a number of paintings towards the end of the exhibition are more domestic in scope, alluding to objects such as kettles or teacups. Several feature limbs stretching from enclosed spaces, as though protesting bodies have been squashed into houses or cages, suggesting themes of enclosure and confinement. Here, as in Galli’s work writ large, the struggle to break free from the limitations of the politicized or objectified body is held in productive tension with the desire to re-engage with it in all its visceral complexity.
Galli: So, So, So continues at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (St James’s, London, United Kingdom), through May 4. The exhibition was curated by Sarah McCrory.