Aigana Gali’s body of work deals with the cosmological. It coheres into a system with a resonant aesthetic and philosophical logic, yet her process is anything but systematic. Gali is guided by a tremendous degree of fluidity, regarding herself as a vessel through which her work is realised. This tension—precision vs. flow—courses through her work; it is probed, embraced, but never resolved.
TENGRI, a presentation of ten paintings from her Light Works and Star Seed series, articulates the latest evolutionary stage in Gali’s self-contained universe, preceded by her Steppe works. The exhibition’s name refers to the shamanistic religion practiced in her homeland of the Kazakh steppe, a sublime, sparsely populated expanse of grassland and sky. Centred on the titular sky god, Tengri ascribes sacred properties to colours, recognising them as potent symbols of the world’s natural order. Fittingly, then, Gali’s Steppe paintings depict layered fields of watery pigments, resulting in an amorphous, ethereal alchemy.
If Gali’s Steppe works can be conceived as meditations on nothingness, then her Light Works and Star Seed paintings can be cast as their cyclical counterpoints, as assertions of being and becoming. The two new series emerge from the void of the steppe, delivering exact messages through biomorphic and geometric forms. Gali engenders these peculiar entities through a process of automatic painting, wielding an extra fine brush in service of her transmissions. The shapes and colours mined from her unconscious unfurl into flat and enigmatic patterns rendered in acrylic and oil paints; the completed compositions evoke the complex spiritual oeuvres of Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton.
Many of the Light Works paintings resemble satellite images of the northern polar cusp, a gap in the Earth’s magnetosphere that generates the Aurora Borealis. The cusp, as captured by NASA, resembles an angel-like emanation, crowned with a halo and flanked by wings—an apt visualisation of the portal between earth and space. The Light Works reinterpret these images, preserving the cusp’s formation and its pellucid quality while adding kaleidoscopic geometric elements. Through Gali’s reverent hand, the images transform into unplaceable totems, true mediators between the known and unknown.
For the Star Seed works, Gali zoomed in sharply. During her residency in Sri Lanka, she derived inspiration from the intricate structure of seeds produced by the country’s abundance of flora. The paintings reimagine the seeds as sci-fi entities, akin to galactic eggs or cocoons. Nonetheless, the Star Seeds are infused with warmth and sensuality, seeming to swell with nourishing juices. Like those in the Light Works, the forms appear to be both of and beyond this planet.
Dancing between macro and micro scales, Gali consistently underscores the mysterious inner workings of the natural world. She also consistently treats these awe-inducing phenomena as catalysts for her unconscious elaborations. TENGRI contains a multitude of contradictory forces—those elucidated here and those yet undetected. Allowing them to co-exist honours not only the Tengri religion but also Gali’s personal artistic and spiritual practice.
by Caroline Reagan for STEMS & ESMB
