The combination of violent scenes with an angular, illustrative style (imagine cartoonist Quentin Blake plotting a hellraiser film) can make Galli’s figurative works uncomfortable viewing. Yet her sharp-nosed, contorted characters are never in anguish; even with spikes driven through their necks and stigmatic wounds on their feet, they appear blindly resigned to the grim hand that fate has dealt them.
Sometimes her figures appear to be in the state of metamorphosis, floating within the frame or oppressively submerged beneath a dense and merciless weight of black scribbles. Galli is adept at depicting a kind of grotesque ambiguity, astounding combinations of the familiar everyday and the threatening, like the painting of a figure either playing a brass horn or being enveloped by a thick, yellow snake.
Stretched over two floors, the exhibition mixes the Berlin-based artist’s paintings with drawings and a couple of videos. In one we see Galli’s impossibly stubby fingers turn the pages of a cut-out book. She was barely more than a metre tall, a fact that – along with her gender – perhaps contributed to a lifetime of marginalisation. But that is all quickly changing. The wall text proudly states that the Deutsche Bank Collection now holds 50 of her works – you’d love to own just one. ★★★★
- PalaisPopulaire, Unter den Linden 5, Mitte, through Oct 7, details.
