The Brooklyn Rail

The neo-Expressionist painters making such a splash in the 1980s in West Berlin were called Junge Wilde because they were young and wild—they were also generally male. One of the few female exceptions was Galli, who was unearthed by the Berlin Biennale in 2020 and is now being honored in a small but important exhibition at Berlin’s PalaisPopulaire. However, it is questionable whether grouping her with the Junge Wilde is to Galli’s favor. Admittedly, she also uses strong colors and expressive, open brushwork, but her paintings have very little to do with the boastful, narcissistic urban romanticism of a Salomé or Rainer Fetting. There are no cool musicians, sexy dancers, or naked swimmers in her work. As she says herself, her subject is the “body as a battleground.” It is therefore more productive to consider Galli’s images of struggling, tortured, and mutilated yet resistant figures in the context of feminist artists such as Maria Lassnig or Louise Bourgeois. In contrast to the male fantasies of omnipotence of the Junge Wilde, in the work of all three of these women, the body is the bearer of feelings of confinement, restraint, and social and physical oppression.

Although she became known as a painter in the 1980s, Galli, who was born in 1944, taught drawing at the FH Münster until her retirement in 2005. However, her oil paintings are ultimately also painted drawings. On a monochrome, mostly pastel background, she lays down the contours of her complex configurations with admirably confident strokes, which she then fills in with color, applying no significant shading. This focus on drawing and the body in a neutral spatial setting is reminiscent of Michelangelo. In fact, the figures of the Renaissance artist also seem to be moved by uncontrollable forces. But whereas in Michelangelo’s works they are idealized, Galli’s lack any heroic pathos. Her bodies are, instead, mutilated, reduced to their expressive parts, or consist only of arms and legs. They are often intertwined with other figures in a puzzling manner or even seem to merge. Despite this, they hardly appear like monsters. Rather, the long, dynamically thrusting lines delimiting the maltreated bodies accentuate their tragic struggle: they do not seem to surrender to their fate. Removed from space and time, Galli’s amorphous creatures are left to their own devices. They wrestle desperately with (in)visible opponents and, above all, themselves.

It is precisely this feeling of powerlessness and being trapped in one’s own body that Galli shares with artists such as Bourgeois and Lassnig, which is why it cannot be attributed solely to her short stature or to disability, but should be seen in the context of feminist empowerment. With her humorous, almost Kippenbergerian anarchic titles (such as the nonsensical Hier wohnt der Schweinepeitschenwurm (2004–14), she repeatedly counteracts the cruelty on display. But this only seemingly lends the works a lighter touch. By depriving the desperate efforts of the writhing, fragmentary bodies of any heroic potential with her ironic titles, their struggle becomes all the more hopeless.

The exhibition at the PalaisPopulaire shows several of these important pictures from the 1980s but concentrates primarily on later groups of works. The extensive series of drawings on index cards in particular conveys Galli’s impressive skill and pictorial wit. While she overloads some sheets with wildly applied strokes, on others she displays a Picasso-like clarity of line that surprises the viewer time and time again with its cunning twists and turns and the multiple views it creates. Equally remarkable is the small cardboard sculpture, in which Galli succeeds in transferring the complex torsion of her maltreated bodies into three dimensions. While one thus must congratulate the PalaisPopulaire on what is one of Galli’s first career surveys, it is a real regret that there is no catalogue, for a comprehensive, illustrated book on this important artist is urgently needed.