Peter Halley • New Paintings
Peter Halley is one of the most important painters of abstraction in
his generation. With the opening of OPEN ART 2019, we are pleased to
present new large-format paintings by the artist again this year.
Peter Halley’s paintings are characterized by geometry, strong colours and strictly consequent composition. They can be read as a critique of a society increasingly controlled by systems of communication, provision and traffic – structures, that don’t even allow the individual to escape from. At the same time, Halley is investigating the essence of painting beyond image and representation.
'New paintings' is a programmatic title: for more than three decades, Peter Halley has been reviewing and reorienting non-figurative painting. Halley even extended his investigation from painting to large installations: most recently in his project 'Heterotopia' at this year’s Venice Biennial. In his new works, Halley intensifies the importance of light, emanating from colour and space in painting.
Peter Halley first came to prominence in the mid-1980s with his diagrammatic representations, his geometrically alienated cells and prisons in strong, fluorescent colours. Since the 1990s, Halley created site-specific installations, in which he integrated his images into large digital prints that covered entire walls.
From 1996 to 2005, Halley published index magazine, focusing on interviews with countless artistic personalities. In 2001, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the renowned College Art Association for his art criticism. From 2002 to 2011, he was Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at Yale. The latest exhibitions with works by Peter Halley were the exhibition “America is Hard to See” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a one-person exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and, currently, his large installation in the rotunda of the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main.
Galerie Thomas Modern exclusively represents Peter Halley in Germany since many years and has presented his works in a number of one-person and group exhibitions, most recently with a large wall installation at Art Basel Unlimited, a solo exhibition, both in 2016, and with an exhibition of his early gouaches in 2018.
