Early Works: Peter Halley

From the 1980s, Peter Halley’s formal vocabulary was firmly defined: cells, prisons, and conduits which form flat and closed-yet-discursive pictorial spaces. The theoretical foundation is established clearly by the artist himself: “Where once geometry provided a sign of stability, order, and proportion, today it offers an array of shifting signifiers and images of confinement and deterrence.”

 

Early Works presents the basis of post-conceptual ideas formed in the 1980s and early 90s that Halley continues to develop to this day. This formative era marked the development of his stylistic language that made him––alongside contemporaries including Ross Bleckner, Jeff Koons, and Haim Steinbach––a standout pioneer of the post-conceptualist, neo-geo movement.

 

Efficiency and dialectic endurance being key to his production, his paintings are labor and thought-intensive energy systems made with a consciously limited number of formal tools and pictorial elements amounting to a positive and fruitful reaction to the alleged “death of painting”. A peculiar intertwinement of painted physicality and worldly connectivity, the works distinctly address persistent elements of both the medium and the now.

 

Peter Halley was born in New York in 1953. He studied first at Yale University and then at the University of New Orleans where he received his MFA. Also a respected art critic and theorist, Halley is revered for his essays and his self-published magazine INDEX featuring interviews and profiles of other artists. His paintings can be found in collections worldwide including MoMA, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tate Modern, London, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among many others.