ABOUT

Aigana Gali a multidisciplinary artist who works across a wide range of media, from canvas and paper to textiles and film, with a process that is delineated by the character of each series. Born on the ancient crossing of the Great Silk Road in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to a Georgian mother and Kazakhstani father, Aigana’s formative years were spent in the wild, open cradle of the Eurasian Steppe. Trained as a painter and a dancer from the age of seven, her artistic sensibility was fine-tuned to the rhythmic character of place, in particular the vibrational quality of light: how the waves bounce or shadows are cast in the shifting theatre of colour. This rich cultural heritage is an infinite source to her work, which she brings to life through the universal language of colour and form.

In relocating to London, Aigana began to explore ways to communicate and translate this cultural milieu. Over the past decade she has developed a powerful lexicon through series, each representing a metaphorical chapter in her evolution as an artist and thinker, and embodied through specific techniques and choice of materials. In Creation Myth, shown at Saatchi, she paints a story through the symbols of her ancestors, enlisting the petroglyphs of Kazakh caves and the cosmology of the Tengri, an ancient form of spirituality found in the Steppe. “The meaning of life for followers of the Tengri is to be at one with nature, and in this we are sustained by both the spirits of heaven and earth: the eternal blue sky and the warm yellow mother beneath our feet.”

The paintings in this series follow the life cycle of a cell (or individual) searching for union and completion, and they are all made with the artist’s fingertips. Using her own body as a tool, she begins each work in a state of meditative stillness. Watching particles move through the light, she waits for the cascade of energy which activates “the atoms of my own body which then participates in this dance of energies.” Like a dancer catching a song, she traces the stories’s outline with her fingers, and works pigments into the canvas. The resulting scenes capture the dreamlike logic of mythology, or ancient hunting scenes discovered on the walls of caves.

Meanwhile Steppe, is a series of works that express Aigana’s spiritual connection to the topographical vastness of her native land. Conjuring the atmospheric emptiness of the vast Eurasian Steppe plains from her London studio, Aigana builds layers of colour by sweeping giant brushes over canvas laid on the floor. Radiant and mutable, like sea or sky, these works capture the ephemeral nature of colour found wide open spaces. As if she had raised her canvas in the desert, these paintings collapse the distance between her two worlds. Made in with a succession of pigments and washes, they resemble monumental water colours, and call to mind the soak stain fluidity of Helen Frankenthaller’s paintings and Turner’s epic skies. As if she had raised her canvas in the desert, these paintings collapse the distance between her two worlds. Like portals into another dimension, she creates an access point for the viewer, to experience something transcendent, works that now grace the walls of private homes, institutions and prestigious venues world wide.

Her work explores some of the deep, recurring themes in art and spirituality, of how we experience the mysterious laws of nature and find our place in the world. Aigana states, “When you are in this place, absent of any human constructs, you begin to empty your mind, and then you begin to observe the self. It is a form of dynamic meditation, where you are liberated from all you have accumulated, and it is sometimes painful as you must look at every part of the self. It is why in the Steppe we have Tengri, an ancient, silent religion in which you relate the self to nature and understand you are a part of it."

In this sense, the Steppe laid the ground work for her next series: Light Works. Having produced suites of large colour field paintings for over a decade, layering the memory of light and colour, Aigana felt ready to deliver a very precise message, something completely different than anything she had done before, and with it a new technique, and process which can be likened to opening a channel and painting automatically. Each work begins from a specific point in the canvas, from which the light and shapes unfold in perfect, geometric order. Using the finest of brushes, the artist kneels before each image, working “like an archeologist, excavating the light.” They represent evolution from the abstract colour fields in Steppe - nothingness - through to the geometric forms of Tengri - being.

“Tengri see colours as symbolic of the natural order of things. Көк, which describes all the blues and greens means ‘god given’. Tengri itself is ‘a great-blue sky'. Sary describes all that is made of earth and all the earthly colours from yellow through red and brown. Umay is the female manifestation of Tengri, coming from earth which is Sary (yellow). So when we are alive our body is from the earth and our soul from the sky and when we die, each returns to its place, and the circle is complete. We are this circle.” This is here, in this union, where each new painting is born. By incorporating biomorphic and geometric shapes into the colour fields that were manifest in Steppe, Aigana is mirroring her own conscious evolution; coming into an awareness of self while retaining a sense of our place - and the space we create - under this ‘grey blue sky’.