Peter Halley
Since the mid-1990’s, Halley has produced site-specific installations and work for exhibitions. The Dallas Museum of Art (Texas) in 1995 commemorated the artist with a one-person museum show. Halley had transformed the museum rooms into a large and spectacular canvas. He chose to present an installation that he conceived as global; paintings, diagrams, silk screens and reliefs covered the entity’s walls. Since then, he has had several site-specific shows, among them: at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris (1995), at the Museum Folkwang in Essen (1998), at Waddington Galleries in London.
Peter Halley became known during the eighties, he was a member of the Neo-Geo movement. His paintings present a parody or critic towards a formal and ideal modernism inherent in his depiction of cells, conducts, prisons and characteristic Roll-a-Tex texture and Day-Glo color. His paintings of this époque were brought for the first time to Spain by la Fundación Caja de Pensiones de Madrid that presented the celebrated exhibition El Arte y su Doble. Soon after, he would have a solo-exhibit at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Since then, Peter Halley has continuously explored different creative ways. In addition to painting, he experiments with computer-generated images, producing his most renowned series in this area of concentration for a one-man show at the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the specialization of sculpture he innovates with glass fibers that he then applies to sculptural reliefs. Further, he occupies a leadership position as theorist in the arts and has published several books. Peter Halley continuous to be involved in an intense and enriching academic life and is professor at institutions both in Europe and the United States. He also produces videos and published Index, a twice-monthly magazine, with curator Bob Nickas from 1996 until 2005.
Pattern of Desire, 1999
Acrylic, fluorescentacrylic,metallic acrylic,
pearlescent acrylic and Roll-a-Tex on canvas
256,5 x 315 cm / 101 x 124 inches
Sonic Schedule, 1999
Acrylic, pearlescent acrylic, metallic acrylic
and Roll-a-Tex on canvas
216 x 165 cm / 85 x 65 in
The exhibition draws on the museum’s own extensive collection of works by the artist—including masterpieces from across his long career—supplemented by key works from other public and private collections, and provides an extended glimpse into the prolific production of this 91-year-old painter. Featuring about ninety works—including some of the artist’s most important paintings—the exhibition will offer visitors a retrospective overview of this seminal artist’s oeuvre from the 1950s to today.
