Painter – ÜNDES, Tengri, Steppe & Creation Myth

Aiganym Gali is a painter who also works in paper, textiles and bronze, adapting her process to the character of each series. Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on the ancient crossing of the Great Silk Road, to a Georgian mother and a Kazakhstani father, she spent her formative years in the wild, open cradle of the Eurasian Steppe.

Her work rests on a long study of Tengri, the ancient philosophy of the steppe, which sees a person as part of nature, held between the sky above and the earth below. Gali paints in long, meditative sessions. She empties her mind and lets forms surface without a plan, a method of automatic painting with a long history in abstract art; the Financial Times has placed her among the heirs of Hilma af Klint.

Her current series, Tengri. Light Works (since 2021) and ÜNDES (2025–26), grow out of Steppe, the long meditative body of work she began in London: open fields of colour that gave way to geometric form and, most recently, to gold leaf on raw canvas.

Represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (London, West Palm Beach and Berlin)

Work in the Kistefos Museum (Norway), The Bunker Artspace (West Palm Beach) and the LightEn collection (UK and USA)

Solo exhibitions: Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi · Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London and West Palm Beach · SETAREH, Düsseldorf

Press: Financial Times · Country Life · Artlyst · Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam · Forbes Kazakhstan

ABOUT & BIO

Explore the Works

ÜNDES

ÜNDES (Resonance), 2025, is Aiganym Gali’s newest series: paintings in acrylic, oil and gold leaf on raw canvas, first shown at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in West Palm Beach in 2026, her first solo exhibition in the United States.

In Kazakh, ündes means resonance. Against the noise of the digital age, each canvas is a meditation on alignment: “the quiet tuning of the soul with sky, others, and time.”

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TENGRI. LIGHT WORKS

Tengri. Light Works (since 2021) grew out of Steppe, the long meditative body of work before it: from the abstract colour fields of Steppe, nothingness, to the geometric forms of Tengri, being. Setting biomorphic and geometric shapes into the spaces Steppe opened, Gali mirrors her own evolution: a growing awareness of self that keeps a sense of our place under this “grey blue sky”.

Film from Light Works, London, 2021

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STEPPE

Steppe (since 2011) is where the work begins: wide fields of colour, built from veils of thinned paint, that hold the light and emptiness of the Kazakh steppe. Many paintings are named after real places, from the Aral Sea to Kaindy, the sunken forest. Shown at the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi.

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Creation Myth

Creation Myth (2019) follows a cell, or a person, searching for union and completion. Gali painted the series with her fingertips, drawing on the petroglyphs of Kazakh caves and the cosmology of Tengri. First shown at START, Saatchi Gallery, London, in 2019.

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