Telegraph Hill Area Guide

Sign up for 1 of 2 urban art mural workshops at Somerville, where youll get the chance to learn and practice your creative spray-paint skills.

Joe Wells and his Daddy Autism Tour Preview. In this new show, critically acclaimed comedian Joe Wells explores fatherhood through the lens of neurodiversity. Plus, theres a really good joke about a parrot. Supported by local poet and comedian Jack Scullion ('Don't Mess It Up Jack' December 2024).

‘The body as a battlefield – that applies to everyone.’ Galli, 2015 So, So, So marks the first UK solo exhibition of artist Galli (b.1944, Germany). Spanning painting, books, collages, and drawings, the exhibition includes works from across her decades long practice. After initial commercial success in the 1980s, Galli’s work was little exhibited, but has rightly gained increasing attention in recent years, with work included in the Berlin Biennale (2020), at brunand brunand gallery (2021), and in Unruly Bodies, a group show at Goldsmiths CCA (2023), amongst others. Galli’s work is a powerful current position on corporeality in a fractious and violent age that proposes an exhilarating, ribald, and haunting grammar of the body. The exhibition’s title – So, So, So – refers to the melodic cadence of the artist’s speech, and, in both English and German, gestures to openness, something to come, and excess. Galli was born Anna-Gabriele Müller in Saarbrücken. Born at the end of the Second World War, her short stature went luckily unnoticed during her infancy under Nazi rule. She initially trained under painters of the Cobra movement, who emphasized an aesthetic break with Western ideals, naturalism, and abstraction. In 1969 she moved to West Berlin to further her studies under painter and graphic artist Martin Engelmann, whose work references Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel and Surrealism. In the 1970s, West Berlin was a city at a turning point, moving away from the hangovers of Nazi fascism and post-war depression, to increasing freedoms, blossoming into an avant-garde scene of squatting, punk music, and feminist and queer civil rights movements. The body as a battlefield was central to these shifts, an arena Galli’s blistering work enters. Galli’s work is freely expressive, instinctive, guttural, and gestural, but as an artist she is governed by strong discipline. Even today, despite severe health and mobility restrictions, she draws daily. The exhibition includes a wide array of drawings, selected to demonstrate the movement of figures and forms through different iterations. Galli draws rapidly, so each has a palpable immediacy, but their chain of evolution evidences a long-time span of deciphering and translation into new compositions that modulate figures, shapes and intensities. Paintings have been selected from the 1980s to 2000s. Some are part of series that used a particular formal device, such as the paravent folding screen, or that were made during a specific period, such as her residency in Florence in 1990. Often made at a large scale, they are incredibly physical works, that bear the traces of their making; ‘It’s about chaos, sorting, chaos, sorting.’ Galli emphasizes her instinctive process, working on a figure and sometimes completely painting over it, until a character is developed that holds a desired emotional force and communicative energy. The resulting figures are anti-heroic, frequently genderless, abject, and often violently contorted and convulsed. They are rendered flesh through spare lines and vivid colour, provoking intense affect. Her approach to figures has often been read through the lens of her short stature and queerness, but Galli herself views this interpretation as limiting. Works such as o.T (es lebe Der breite Prinsel) (1989) and Hocker (1989) directly reference the act of art making, as a violent process of fragmentation. Despite the intensely personal dialogue through which the works are created, they never impose a singular reading, or refer to the artist as the arbiter of meaning. Her works draw on sources such as mythology, art history, and the particularities of sexual desire, but through formal ambiguity flattens hierarchies of interpretation. Latter pieces concentrate more closely on domestic space, so that figures grow out of washing machines, or objects speak to one another in claustrophobic boxed-in spaces. Here a sense of home becomes ambivalent, as a safe enclosure, but also an unbearable pressure chamber that swallows the body and erodes the division between object and subject. Whilst her West Berlin contemporaries, the Neue Wilde, drew on the energies of punk, Galli occupied a different territory, mixing with literary figures such as Romanian poet Oskar Pastior, the only German-language member of the Oulipo and with whom she produced an artist book, and Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch whose work examines the tensions of identity and social conventions. Her works often incorporate texts, within the pictorial plane or as punning titles, in a Dadaist mode of quotation from newspapers, a shopping list, poem, or what might have been playing on the radio.

4 Poofs and a Piano's David Roper brings us his own chaotic, curious and charming musical adventure. David Roper (Composer/Musical Director,4 Poofs and a Piano from Friday Night With Jonathan Ross) is finally doing a solo show. Cataloguing his chaotic and curious adventure from watching ships launch on the River Tyne to homemade boats in a Billabong in Perth Western Australia, tarmacing roads outside a Gay Bar in Brighton and then to parenthood in South London. In words and music.

A restorative session, with a gentle focus on the breath, suitable for everyone. Please bring a mat or blanket if you can. Wrap up warm we will be lying down most of the session.

Join our friends at Froglife to get out in nature and meet some of the wildlife in our garden. Ellie Pritchard is the founder of Arbor Projects and a creative freelancer for Froglife’s London Blue Chain project. Ellie will be delivering an interactive Freshwater Food Web Workshop that focuses on the importance of biodiversity. The session will be a playful way to learn about amphibians, reptiles, and invertebrates, where participants can transform a space into a freshwater habitat through craft activities and explore the complex feeding relationships within the ecosystem. Froglife is a national wildlife charity committed to the conservation of amphibians and reptiles – frogs, toads, newts, snakes and lizards – and saving the habitats they depend on. You can find out more about them here: www.froglife.org. This workshop is free to attend but please book a place for your child so we can monitor numbers. Please also consider making a donation to the Albany garden, so that we can continue to provide free gardening activities throughout the year.