FORTHCOMING
STEPPE
A book by Aiganym Gali
with Nico Kos Earle
The first monograph of the artist: the Kazakh steppe as she carries it within.
For Aiganym Gali the steppe was never scenery. It is a vast, silent land, a horizon of “nothing” that holds much magic inside, and it taught her how to see.
Growing up on the open plains of Kazakhstan, she found that emptiness is never empty. Out there, absent of any human constructs, “you begin to empty your mind, and then you begin to observe the self.” The light is always changing; the colours never settle. Her paintings are an attempt to hold that changing picture still for a moment.
Steppe brings together more than twenty of those paintings, made in London from memory since 2011, beside photographs of the places that live inside them, the legends carried in their names, the ancient philosophy of Tengri, and a long conversation with the curator, art critic and writer Nico Kos Earle.
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“When
you correlate your life with such huge
empty spaces
you see things differently.”
things
AIGANYM GALI
Inside Steppe: “The meaning of life for the followers of Tengri is to be at one with nature… the eternal blue sky, and the warm yellow mother beneath our feet.”
INSIDE THE BOOK
THE PAINTINGS
More than twenty works from the Steppe series, each one an imprint of a place: the Caspian, the Aral Sea, the canyon of Charyn, the sunken forest of Lake Kaindy. Reproduced large, so their veils of colour can be read slowly.
THE SPIRIT OF THE LAND
The steppe as the artist knows it: “So much negative space and nothingness, yet, paradoxically, it had enough of everything for me: a phenomenal theatre of light.” Photographs of the plains, canyons and lakes sit beside the paintings they gave rise to.
THE STORIES
The legends behind the titles. Akku, the white swan of the Kazakh origin myth, whose song is about letting go and learning to fly. Kaindy, a forest “suspended by water and preserved through time”. The Aral Sea, and the slow return of its water.
TENGRI
The ancient, silent faith of the steppe, in which colour holds a natural order: Kök, the blues and greens of the sky, Sary, the yellows and browns of the earth. “Our body is from the earth and our soul from the sky.”
IN CONVERSATION
Aiganym Gali with Nico Kos Earle: on growing up on the steppe, on painting it from memory in a windowless London studio, and on light. Read an excerpt
A POEM
Written for the artist by Nico Kos Earle and set among the paintings: “Only when you step into the void / Will you experience the fullness of nothing.”
Inside Steppe: the story of the Aral Sea, opposite the artist’s words.
“Only in reflection
can we see the true nature of
the sun.”
A BOOK TO LIVE WITH
In an age of endless images on screens, Steppe is made to be held: generous pages that give each painting room, colour checked against the original canvases, a book to return to rather than scroll past.
“When you live with these paintings, they are constantly shifting; they give you another dimension of colour and light.”
AIGANYM GALI
THE AUTHORS
AIGANYM GALI
Painter, born in Almaty in 1980, 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
Independent curator, art critic and writer, and a member of the Critics’ Circle. She has documented and written about Gali’s work for many years, in essays for Artlyst and in the texts that accompanied her exhibitions in London and West Palm Beach.
