ABOUT
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2026 ÜNDES | Resonance, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, USA
2024 Light Works, SETAREH, Düsseldorf, Germany
2023 Tengri – Star Seeds, STEMS & ESMB Gallery, Dubai, UAE
2023 Lux Ex Machina, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK
2022 Steppe into Tengri, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK
2020 Manifestations, 68 Kinnerton Street, London, UK
2015 Steppe, Georgian National Museum of Art, Tbilisi, Georgia
2011 The Holy Garden, The Hay Hill Gallery, London, UK
2009 OYU Art Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan
2007 A. Kasteyev State Museum of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan
2006 Zig-Zag Art Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan
2005 Ark Art Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan
2004 The Alma-Ata Art Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan
2004 Untitled, AVA Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026 Rhythm in the Blues, presented by Octavia Art Gallery and Julia Campbell Carter, 14 Percy Street, London
2025 Self-Similar, curated by Mat Chivers, Paul Smith Space, London
2025 After Leonora: Echoes of Surrealism, Gillian Jason Gallery, London
2024 Mythic Origins, SETAREH, Berlin
2024 Navigating With Nature, Tach Space, Hanoi
2023 Abundance, Maison Suri, Paris
2023 La Makan. Cosmic Corporeality, Ainalaiyn Space, London
2023 Lightness of Being, Kwai Fung Hin Gallery, Hong Kong
2021 Blue Minds Festival, Catherine Prevost, London
2021 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London
2021 Light Works, London
2016 Hay Hill Gallery, London
2016 VP Studio Art4, Moscow
2015 Hay Hill Gallery, London
ART FAIRS
2024 Art Cologne, with SETAREH, Cologne, Germany
2024 Contemporary Istanbul, with Gillian Jason Gallery, Istanbul, Türkiye
2024 Art Düsseldorf, with SETAREH, Düsseldorf, Germany
2019 START Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (solo presentation: Creation Myth)
EDUCATION
2010 - 2011 MA Degree, Sotheby’s Institute of Art
2005 - 2007 Postgraduate Degree, Art History, Institute Of Literature and Art, Academy of Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
2001- 2005 Bachelor of Arts, Fine Art, Kazakh Leading Academy of Art and Architecture (KazGASA), Almaty, Kazakhstan
Aiganym Gali is 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, Gali’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, Gali 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, first shown at START at the Saatchi Gallery in 2019, 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 story’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 Gali’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, Gali 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 with a succession of pigments and washes, they resemble monumental water colours, and call to mind the soak stain fluidity of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings and Turner’s epic skies. 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. Gali 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, Gali 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, Gali 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’.
Gali’s solo exhibitions include the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London and West Palm Beach, and SETAREH in Düsseldorf. Her work is in the Kistefos Museum, The Bunker Artspace and the LightEn collection. She has shown in group exhibitions alongside Marina Abramović, Es Devlin and Mark Wallinger (Self-Similar, Paul Smith Space, London, 2025) and Callum Innes, Anna Barriball and Gideon Rubin (Blue Minds, London, 2021), and at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
In the media
KEY FACTS
Born 1980, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Lives and works London, United Kingdom, and Mallorca, Spain
Represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (London, West Palm Beach and Berlin)
Collections Kistefos Museum, Norway · The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach · LightEn collection, UK and USA
Medium Acrylic and oil on canvas; also works on paper, textiles and bronze
Series Steppe (2011–) · Creation Myth (2019) · Tengri. Light Works (2021–) · ÜNDES (2025–26)
Education MA, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London (2011); postgraduate degree in art history, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan (2007); BA Fine Art, KazGASA, Almaty (2005)
Selected exhibitions Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi (solo, 2015); Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (solo, 2022 and 2023) and West Palm Beach (solo, 2026); SETAREH, Düsseldorf (solo, 2024); Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London (2021)
Press Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam, Forbes Kazakhstan, Country Life, Artlyst