Art Plural Gallery is delighted to announce the solo exhibition of world renowned American artist, Peter Halley. Featuring more than 15 years of creation, the retrospective exhibition will run on the first floor of the gallery.
Born in New York in 1953, Peter Halley is acclaimed for his geometric colourful abstract paintings that have travelled across the globe to join the most prestigious institutions such as the Guggenheim, New York, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Obsessively playing with rectangular shapes linked with a quantity of tubes, the artist reinterprets the structure of prison cells or computer chips through constructive and highly organized juxtapositions anchoring his work in contemporary issues.
Peter Halley’s work is dense in colour and texture. From the dark palette of the years 2000, fluorescent compositions strike the eye while attracting it towards the velvet-looking coarse surfaces of the canvas. Creating a superimposition, the various layers objectify the theme of the painting and invite the viewer to penetrate in a reality coded with colours. Indeed, Peter Halley’s abstract aesthetic is counterbalanced with the precision devoted to titles. The work entitled Horizontal Blue Prison over Horizontal Blue Prison stands for an example of how the artist contextualises each painting in details. To this extent, Peter Halley, along with Frank Stella or Daniel Buren for instance, participates in the renewal of pure abstraction towards an artistic movement that integrates symbolism, figuration and functionality. “I always thought that my works were representing something in a way or another. I never understood abstraction”, declares the artist. The representational reality in Peter Halley’s works transcends the static geometry and questions the actual presence of the painting.
“In the past, geometry meant stability, order and proportions, but it offers today a changing multiplicity of meanings, images of imprisonment and dissuasion,” he also states. Thus, Peter Halley extends the metaphor of a prison and develops various series of cells representing the mental isolation and oppression of jails, hospitals and cities seen as global impersonal machines. The prison lexical field engages a dialogue with the recurrence of a vocabulary related to technology, communication and information fluxes.
However, there is no identity between the described reality and the bright pleasant colours and simple filled shapes that enlighten this narrative thread recalling advertising visuals. In the artist’s words, his latest works are not described as sinister or disturbing but rather as joyful, humorous and excessive compositions. This contrast relays Halley’s fantasizing quest that pulled him, at the beginning of his artistic career, towards Matisse’s aesthetics. Synthesizing both human penchants, Peter Halley offers colours as a remedy to despair.
Peter Halley’s work is highly enmeshed in a socio-political environment. The artist interprets American pop mass culture as a fantasy that leads art to commercially-appealing decorative forms. Furthermore, post industrialisation is clearly targeted in his themes and motifs. “The social is finally becoming the site of pure abstraction. Each human being is no longer just a number, but is a collection of numbers, each of which ties him or her to a different matrix of information. There is the telephone number, the social security number, and the credit card number”, says Peter Halley. Paradoxically, abstraction becomes the mirror of society. The artist underlines different oppositions such as the abstract and the figurative, darkness and colours, rigorous geometry and purity of forms, imprisonment and communication. However, he places his work outside of a critical process emphasizing the multiple layers of interpretation and continues to defy categorisation.
-Art Plural Gallery
Image: © Peter Halley
Courtesy of the artist and Art Plural Gallery
