STEPPE
a book by Aiganym Gali with Nico Kos Earle
FORTHCOMING
Steppe is the first book on Aiganym Gali’s founding series: large paintings of light and open space, made from the memory of the Kazakh steppe. Written with the curator and writer Nico Kos Earle, it brings the paintings together with the places that inspired them, the stories behind their names and the artist’s own words.
“My Steppe series is about looking into the void, being there and understanding the fullness of nothing, the light in emptiness.”
Aiganym Gali
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Steppe will be printed in a small first edition. Leave your name and email to be told as soon as the book can be ordered, before it is announced anywhere else.
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INSIDE THE BOOK
The paintings. More than twenty works from the Steppe series, reproduced at large scale: the Caspian and the Aral Sea, the canyon of Charyn, the plains of Altyn Emel, the sunken forest of Lake Kaindy.
The places. Photographs of the steppe, its lakes, canyons and open plains: the landscapes that shaped the artist, and that she paints from memory.
The stories. The Kazakh legends and songs behind the titles: Akku, the white swan of the Kazakh origin myth; the drowned spruce forest of Kaindy; the slow return of water to the Aral Sea.
The conversation. Aiganym Gali in conversation with Nico Kos Earle: on the steppe and Tengri, on painting in a windowless London studio, and on the light at the heart of her painting. Read an excerpt.
A poem by Nico Kos Earle, written for the artist.
AKKU, 200 x 140 cm. Named after the küi, or song, of the white swan in the Kazakh origin myth.
KAINDY, 150 x 95 cm. Lake Kaindy, where the trunks of a drowned spruce forest still rise from the water.
ARAL I, 2015, 200 x 200 cm. The Aral Sea, where water is slowly returning after decades of drying out.
MADE WITH THE SAME CARE
Steppe is being made with the care of the paintings themselves: generous pages that give each work room to breathe, colour checked against the original canvases, and the land shown at the scale it deserves. A book to be looked at slowly, and kept. The details of the edition will be shared first with those on the list.
THE AUTHORS
Aiganym Gali (b. 1980, Almaty) is a painter based in London and Mallorca. Steppe, begun in London in 2011, is the series from which her later work, Tengri. Light Works and ÜNDES, grew. About the artist.
Nico Kos Earle is an independent curator and writer. Her essays on Gali’s work have appeared in Artlyst and accompanied her exhibitions in London and West Palm Beach.