Peter Halley

(1953)

«What was really important to me was understanding the networks of space that surround us, whether it’s the physical space of streets and highways, or the communication space of telephones, television, and ultimately the internet. It was so interesting to have the opportunity to experience the early days of the digital era in the 1980s.»

Peter Halley, born in 1953 in New York, is one of the indispensable figures of contemporary geometric abstraction and, more specifically, of the neo-geo movement. He first established himself on the New York art scene, with his work often inspired by the architecture and urbanism of Manhattan, from which he explores the effects on the modalities of social connection. In his early years, in the 1980s, he was part of the group of artists – among whom we find Jeff Koons – who founded the gallery International With Monument. At the time, their common trait was to question, through minimalist artistic creations, post-consumerist postmodernity. Peter Halley is interested in communication networks, whether they be the urban quadrilages that determine our interactions or the digital circuits that digitize and virtualize our existences. The artist is struck by the alienation produced by these webs of connections that isolate individuals, and his work presents itself as a metaphor for the dehumanizing effects of these formal devices.

Peter Halley’s work is marked by the recurring motif of what he calls «cells» and «prisons,» matrix elements of a singular visual language that explores the patterns of spatial geometry. The replication of these abstract figures gives rise to a formal play of contrasting bright and fluorescent colors, realized in industrial paint and synthetic plaster. In his more recent research, particularly the Constructor Paintings, or on occasion in in situ installations, he breaks free from the plane surface to introduce volume effects that further exacerbate this architecture and the structuring of space that subjugates us and reduces us to a purely functional being-in-the-world. Peter Halley’s iconography contributes to a structuralist reflection on social organization, in the vein of philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, who greatly influenced his artistic path, which can be understood as an aesthetic and graphic theorization of the determinisms that imprison us. He himself has published works of reflection on the paradoxical effects of modernity on our individual freedoms. The strong visual impact of Peter Halley’s works never leaves the viewer indifferent and sounds like a warning against the illusion of the functionality of a colorful universe. How can one incorporate one’s subjectivity and experience one’s freedom in a world governed by mechanisms?

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Black No. 13, 1992

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Peter Halley

Black No. 13, 1992

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