ART-PRESENTATION: Peter Halley-Paintings from the 1980s

Peter Halley is known for depicting cells, prisons and conduits, rendered in fluorescent Day-Glo acrylic paint and Roll-a-Tex texture additive. Halley came to prominence in the early ‘80s with a group of artists which included Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach. Halley, and the group loosely labelled “Neo-Geo”, deployed a cool irony as an important counterpoint to the neo-expressionism prevalent at the time.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Stuart Shave/Modern Archive

Peter Halley’s paintings are diagrams of the lived experience in a contemporary urban environment, in which social space is ever more divided and geometrised but individuals remain connected via conduits of information flows, roadways and electrical grids. Peter Halley in his solo exhibition “Paintings from the 1980s” at Stuart Shave/Modern in London presents a selection of paintings that surveys an important period of his work, dating from 1982-87. The works in this exhibition show the development during this decade of relationships between flat and textured geometric elements that the artist refers to as “cells”, “prisons” and “conduits”. For Halley, these elements comprise a formal vocabulary that reflects the increasingly geometric divisions of social spaces of the world in which we live. Halley’s work is consistently concerned with abstraction not only in art, but in broader terms of culture and human behavior. In 1980 Halley was drawn to the pop themes and social issues addressed in New Wave music. Inspired by New York’s intense urban environment, Halley set out to use the language of geometric abstraction to describe the actual geometricized space around him. He also began his iconic use of fluorescent Day-Glo paint. In 1984, Halley started to exhibit with the International With Monument gallery, becoming closely associated with the organization and its artists, who exhibited conceptually rigorous work in a market-savvy, coolly presented space that stood in stark contrast to the bohemian, Neo-Expressionist flair of the East Village art scene at the time. In 1986, an exhibition of four artists from International With Monument at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York heralded the group’s growing success. By the late ‘80s, Halley was exhibiting with prominent galleries in the U.S.A. and Europe. While developing his visual language, Halley became interested in French post-structuralist writers, including Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, and Paul Virillio, all of whom shared his concern with the character of social spaces in a post-industrial society. In 1981, he published his first essay “Beat, Minimalism, New Wave, and Robert Smithson” in Arts, a New York based magazine that would publish eight of his essays before the decade’s end. Halley’s writings became the basis for Neo-Geometric Conceptualism (also known as Neo-Geo). In 1988, the artist’s writings were anthologized in “Collected Essays, 1981-1987”, and again in 1997 in a second anthology “Recent Essays, 1990–1996”.

Info: Stuart Shave / Modern Art, 4-8 Helmet Row, London, Duration: 27/1-18/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.modernart.net