Peter Halley was born in New York in 1953. He received his BA from Yale University and his MFA from the University of New Orleans in 1978. Moving back to New York City had big influence on Halley’s painting style. Its three-dimensional urban grid led to geometric paintings that engage in a play of relationships between 'prisons', 'cells, and 'conduits' – symbolic motifs that reflect the increasing geometricization of social space in the world. Halley began to use colours and materials with specific connotations, such as fluorescent Day-Glo paint, mimicking the eerie glow of artificial lighting and reflective clothing and signs, as well as Roll-a-Tex, a texture additive used as surfacing in suburban buildings.

Halley is part of a generation of artists that first exhibited in New York’s East Village in the 1960s and 70s. This group includes Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Meyer Vaisman, and Ashley Bickerton, all of whom collectively became identified on a wider scale with neo-geo and neo-conceptualism. Focusing on the commodification of art and its relation to gender, race, and class, this group questioned art and their institutions with irony and pastiche.

Halley's works were included in the Sao Paolo Biennale, the Whitney Biennale and the 54th Venice Biennale and represented in such museums and art institutions as the CAPC Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, The Tate Modern, London, the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio.

Halley lives and works in New York City.