Peter Halley

Highly celebrated as a painter since his early days as a prominent member of New York’s 1980s art scene and a leading main champion of the Neo-Geo movement, Peter Halley (born 1953) has also created challenging and idiosyncratic site-specific installations, exhibition scenography and permanent public works that have extended his practice to a larger scale.
A companion to Paintings of the 1980s: The Catalogue Raisonné (2017), this volume gathers together all the installation works realized by the artist between 1980 and 2022, with extensive documentation. From his collaborations with legendary design maestro Alessandro Mendini to his monumental projects at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and the Lever House in New York, from his early groundbreaking exhibitions in downtown New York to private and public commissions, this book encompasses a lesser-known but decisive aspect of Halley’s oeuvre.

Throughout his career, American painter Peter Halley (born 1953) has developed a vocabulary derived from geometric abstraction that reflects the contemporary world. His works are inhabited by “prisons,” “cells” and “conduits,” the result of his reflections on the alienation of contemporary society, whose members live in cramped spaces (cells or prisons) interconnected by a system of circuits (conduits) encompassing pipes, chimneys, electrical installations and the Internet. Halley’s geometric compositions are characterized by an apparent simplicity that makes it tempting to follow the lines of the conduits. Yet, with a sense of humor, the artist often decides to cut the connections: adding to the absurdity of contemporary society. The bright, often fluorescent colors create vibrant paintings that convey a joyful vision of the world. This monograph presents Halley’s work from its beginnings to the present, with a specific focus on tracing the reception of his work in Europe.

In his series of colorful geometric paintings shown at Dallas Contemporary, Peter Halley (born 1953) rearranges his rigorous visual language of “conduits” and “cells” into structured square grids reminiscent of 20th-century modernist artists such as Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian. This playful board book, according to curator Peter Doroshenko, “aims to elucidate the true essence of Halley’s Cell Grid paintings … the complex interplay between the visual and the conceptual in his work.” Art critic and historian Barry Schwabsky writes that these works mark a new phase—which time will reveal as either a momentous shift or ultimately a continuation—in Halley’s career as a protagonist of contemporary abstract and geometric painting. But as Halley himself says of his Cell Grids series, “I’ve always had a sense of humor about my work. It amuses me to think that someone looking at one of these paintings might think, ‘Peter Halley has finally given up and become an abstract painter.’”

This survey revisits the first decade of Peter Halley’s (born 1953) career. Assembling over 30 paintings from public and private collections, it presents iconic works alongside previously unseen drawings, sketches and notes. After studying at Yale and in New Orleans in the late 1970s Halley returned to New York in 1980, taking up residence in the East Village. That same year he painted his first images of confinement, redeploying the language of geometric abstraction in response to bureaucratic environments. Adopting nontraditional materials such as Roll-A-Tex—a paint additive that provides a readymade texture—and Day-Glo fluorescent colors, he evoked a pervasive mechanization of human touch with the former and referenced the presence of technology in the postmodern environment with the latter.