ART-PRESENTATION: Peter Halley-The Schirn Ring
Since the ‘80s, in his geometric abstract paintings and site-specific installations, Peter Halley has engaged in a critical examination of the spatial structures as well as the organizational and communication structures that govern everyday life. In today’s world, where our lives are so influenced and altered by both algorithms created by the digital industry and the superficial appeal of the media world, we find ourselves, as it were, within a Halley’s composition.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Artchive
Peter Halley with “The Schirn Ring” at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, has developed a multi-part installation, using the architecture and spatial conditions of the Rotunda and the Schirn Kunsthalle as his starting point. Halley has designed an atmospheric, spatially complex, inventively coded environment that draws on both current and older elements of the artist’s oeuvre. The sunlight enters from the skylight passes through a 14 meter translucent disc, filling the space with an artificial yellow light, the entire floor is painted yellow to further intensify the effect, while two floors of the Rotunda’s perimeter are clad with a grid of 3-meter-high reflective digital prints using Halley’s semi-abstract explosion images. In the first floor gallery, Halley has covered the walls from floor to ceiling with a digitally printed mural illuminated only with ultraviolet black light. Halley has reproduced, with myriad repetitions of his computer-drawn studies for his prison paintings, transforming the wall into an endless luminous grid. On the entire wall of the second floor gallery, against a yellow background, Halley presents a montage of drawings reproduced from his sketchbooks of the ‘80s, mixed together with diagrams from the Large Hadron Collider and other notations taken from the particle physics. In the second floor corridor gallery, Halley has placed several more works from the early years of his career. His pioneering painting, “Rectangular Prison with Smokestack” (1987), holds center stage. It is accompanied by two wall-size flow-chart diagrams from the late ‘90s, demonstrating Halley’s early interest in the algorithms Lastly, the artist has included the digital animation video “Exploding Cell” (1983), using an early video game syntax, it depicts a narrative in which one of Halley’s cells becomes filled with red-hot gas and explodes.
Info: Curator: Max Hollein, SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Römerberg, Frankfurt, Duration: 12/5-21/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri-sun 10:00-19:00, Wed-Thu 10:00-22:00, www.schirn.de
