Press
Information for journalists and editors: a short biography, key facts, selected exhibitions and coverage, and images. For interviews, studio visits and high-resolution images, please write to studio@aiganymgali.com.
Studio studio@aiganymgali.com
Gallery Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, West Palm Beach and Berlin
FORTHCOMING
4 November 2026 · Under the Eternal Blue Sky
Keynote address by Aiganym Gali at Kazakhstan at 35: A Symposium on a Transforming Nation, held by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs with the British Embassy in Astana at King’s College London. The keynote is at 10:30 GMT, after opening remarks by HE Sally Axworthy MBE, British Ambassador to Kazakhstan, and HE Alibek Bakayev, Ambassador of Kazakhstan to the United Kingdom. The symposium runs from 09:30 to 16:30, in person and online, and is free to attend: registration with the RSAA.
Gali is in London on 4 and 5 November and available for interviews.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Aiganym Gali (b. 1980, Almaty, Kazakhstan) is a painter based in London and Mallorca. Trained in the Soviet academic tradition, she took her degree in fine art in Almaty and a postgraduate degree in art history at the Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan, before completing an MA at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. Her practice is grounded in Tengri, the ancient philosophy of the Eurasian Steppe, and in a meditative, automatic method of painting; the Financial Times has placed her among the heirs of Hilma af Klint. Her principal series, Steppe, Tengri. Light Works and ÜNDES, have been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and SETAREH, Düsseldorf. Her work has been exhibited alongside that of Leonora Carrington and Marina Abramović and is held in the Kistefos Museum, The Bunker Artspace and the LightEn collection.
ABOUT THE WORK
Aiganym Gali paints the steppe of Kazakhstan, the open land she grew up beside, and the old way of seeing the world that belongs to it. She moved from Almaty to London in 2007, and distance made the landscape her subject. For fifteen years she has painted it from memory, in thin washes of colour finished with the fingertips, looking for what she calls “the fullness of nothing, the light in emptiness”.
Behind the work is Tengri, the ancient philosophy of the Eurasian steppe, in which people stand between Heaven and Earth and the sacred is at once beyond the world and present in all of it. Gali treats it as a philosophy and a cultural memory rather than a religion. She paints without preliminary drawings, in long, unplanned sessions: a way of working with deep roots in modern abstraction, from Hilma af Klint to the Surrealists.
Her work unfolds in series. Steppe (since 2011) is the foundation. Tengri. Light Works (since 2021) brings precise geometry into those open fields of colour. ÜNDES (2025–26), from the Kazakh word for resonance, adds raw canvas and gold leaf: paintings she thinks of as instruments rather than images, made slowly by hand at a time of endless machine-made pictures.
KEY FACTS
Born 1980, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Lives and works London, United Kingdom, and Mallorca, Spain (studio in Mallorca)
Represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (London, West Palm Beach and Berlin)
Collections Kistefos Museum, Norway · The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach · the LightEn collection, UK and USA · Atelier 27
Series Steppe (since 2011) · Creation Myth (2019) · Tengri. Light Works (since 2021) · ÜNDES (2025–26)
Medium Acrylic and oil on canvas, with gold leaf in recent works; also works on paper, textiles and bronze
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
Solo
2026 · ÜNDES | Resonance · Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach (her first solo exhibition in the United States)
2024 · Light Works · SETAREH, Düsseldorf
2023 · Tengri. Star Seeds · STEMS and ESMB Gallery, Dubai
2023 · Lux Ex Machina · Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London
2022 · Steppe into Tengri · Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London
2016 · Steppe · Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi
Group
2026 · Rhythm in the Blues · 14 Percy Street, London
2025 · Self-Similar · Paul Smith Space, London, with Marina Abramović, Es Devlin and Mark Wallinger
2025 · After Leonora: Echoes of Surrealism · Gillian Jason Gallery, London, with Leonora Carrington
Full exhibition history: About.
TALKS AND FILM
4 November 2026 · Under the Eternal Blue Sky · keynote, Royal Society for Asian Affairs, King’s College London (recording to follow)
March 2026 · Can art recalibrate perception? Gali in conversation with Nico Kos Earle, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach (video)
SELECTED COVERAGE
Financial Times · “The cosmic heirs of Hilma af Klint”, Victoria Woodcock, 26 May 2023
Forbes Kazakhstan · “Elevating the Steppe: An Artist from Kazakhstan Finds Success in London”, Alena Timofeeva, 7 November 2023
Artlyst · Nico Kos Earle, 26 October 2023
Maison Marie Claire Korea · “Suri in Paris”, November 2023
Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam · on the exhibition Navigating with Nature, Hanoi, 9 April 2024
Country Life · 11 October 2021
All coverage: In the Media.
PRESS IMAGES
The images below may be reproduced in coverage of Aiganym Gali’s work, with the caption and credit given. High-resolution files are available on request from studio@aiganymgali.com.
Aiganym Gali. Courtesy of the artist
NUR, 2021. Tengri. Light Works. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist
ALAKAI II, 2023. Tengri. Light Works. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 160 x 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist
ARAL I, 2015. Steppe. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist
TÜNGIR, 2025. ÜNDES. Acrylic, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 120 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist
KAINDY. Steppe. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 150 x 95 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist