Peter Halley
- Bio
American, b. 1953
- Status
- Followers
- 4.5k
Notable Works
Having emerged in New York’s East Village Art scene in the early 1980s, Peter Halley is best known for his brightly colored, geometric paintings made of Roll-a-Tex, a textured paint used for decoration, as well as florescent Day-Glo paints. Developing his own visual lexicon, Halley engages in a play of relationships between what he calls “prisons” and “cells”—composed of rectangular shapes and vertical bars—evocative of geometric networks from the urban grid to high-rise apartment buildings to electromagnetic conduits. While his rigid planes of color, unitary shapes, and non-hierarchical compositions nod toward Minimalism, by transforming the Minimalist square into a prison cell, Halley’s works call the supposed neutrality of such art into question.
Notable Works
Having emerged in New York’s East Village Art scene in the early 1980s, Peter Halley is best known for his brightly colored, geometric paintings made of Roll-a-Tex, a textured paint used for decoration, as well as florescent Day-Glo paints. Developing his own visual lexicon, Halley engages in a play of relationships between what he calls “prisons” and “cells”—composed of rectangular shapes and vertical bars—evocative of geometric networks from the urban grid to high-rise apartment buildings to electromagnetic conduits. While his rigid planes of color, unitary shapes, and non-hierarchical compositions nod toward Minimalism, by transforming the Minimalist square into a prison cell, Halley’s works call the supposed neutrality of such art into question.