Peter Halley / Recent Works
Mar 28 – May 23, 2015
Peter Halley (b. 1953), the prominent and leading American artist, is renowned for his unique, minimalistic style. Throughout his extensive career as a creator, author, art critic and educator, Halley has been examining the abstract image in the digital culture, and the way in which reality is defined by technology.
The meticulous geometry in Halley’s works is a raw material that indicates on his interest in isolation, alienation, connection and abstraction of the environment and familiar figures. Using dazzling, industrial and metal synthetic colors, along with the color additive –Roll-A-Tex – used to create decorative textures in residencies, Halley creates bold and beautiful images, which hold provocative ideas that seek to challenge the viewer.
Halley’s geometric paintings deal with the relationships between what he calls the “prison”, and “cells” – for him, these are symbols that reflect the geometry of the contemporary social space. A sort of diagram of a modern urban environment, in which the social space is isolated and geometrically divided, and the connection between the people living in it is through information “tubes” and physical junctions such as roads and power grids.
For years, Halley developed and refined his technique. At the beginning of his artistic career in the ’80s, he created abstract color surfaces, which are considered ahead of their time from a contemporary view. Influenced by formalist and minimalist artists such as Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Piet Mondrian and Ed Reinhardt, and inspired by the intense urban environment in New York, Halley began using the language of geometric abstraction to describe the environment as he sees it.
Halley’s early works were created prior to the digital age and the invasion of computers and cell phones, and yet they evoke a sense of existential isolation which characterizes the technological reality as we experience it in these days.
Solo exhibitions by Peter Halley were shown at important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, capc Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Butler Institute of American Art, as well as in leading galleries including Mary Boone, New York, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Galerie Alain Noirhomme, Brussels, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, and more.