Peter Halley is an American artist who also writes on art and works as a teacher. He is mostly known for his colorful geometric abstract paintings. Halley represents Minimalist and Neo-Geo art movements.
Background
Ethnicity:
Peter Halley’s father was of a German-Austrian origin and his mother had Polish roots.
Peter Halley was born on September 24, 1953, in New York City, New York, United States. He is a son of Rudolph Halley, a lawyer and politician, and Janice Halley, a nurse.
Halley’s father was an active person in the political life of the United States – he worked as a chief prosecutor for the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, an assistant to the wartime Truman Committee and had presided the New York City Council from 1951 to 1953. He died when Peter was three years old.
Peter Halley also has such notable relatives as his first cousin Carl Solomon who has become an inspiration of the epic poem ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. The artist’s great aunt and uncle, Rose and A.A. Wyn, worked in the American publishing agency called Ace Books and published Ace Comics (1940-1956) and Ace Books (1952-1973).
Education
Peter Halley began his education at the Hunter College Elementary School in New York City, New York, United States in 1959. Later, he entered a preparatory school Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. While at the institution known for its art museum and original art program, Halley revealed his passion and talent for painting and produced his first artworks. Young Peter discovered Interaction of Color by Josef Albers, the book which had a huge influence on his further career. Halley graduated in 1971.
The same year, he decided to enrol at the Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut where he had studied for two years. In 1973, Peter moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. During the one-year stint in the city, he explored its culture and discovered the writings of the artist Robert Smithson.
Peter Halley came back to Yale in 1974 and with his senior thesis on Henri Matisse obtained the following year the Bachelor degree in art history.
In 1976, he came again to New Orleans and pursued his artistic training at the University of the city. Halley received his Master of Fine Arts degree two years later.
The start of Peter Halley’s career can be counted from 1978 when he first exhibited solo at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. He taught during one semester at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.
Two years later, he came back to New York City. Inspired by its urban modernist buildings and subways as well as by New Wave music, the artist produced his early geometric compositions made with fluorescent Day-Glo acrylic colours and Roll-a-Tex texture paint.
This time, Halley also became fascinated with the books of such French post-structuralist writers like Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, and Paul Virillio. Their writings inspired him in 1981 on the first essay ‘Beat, Minimalism, New Wave’ which was published by the New York magazine called Robert Smithson in Arts. Seven more essays the artist wrote during the decade also appeared in this periodical.
The debut solo-exhibition of Halley’s artworks in New York City took place at the PS122 Gallery in 1980. In five years, he began to collaborate with the International Monument gallery.
The group exhibition that finally brought the painter a status of the Neo-Geo artist was organized in October 1986 at the Sonnabend Gallery of New York City.
Halley continued to write on Post-Modernism, art, and culture. In 1988, the collection of his essays were gathered in the book Collected Essays published by Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich.
The beginning of the new decade was marked by the first retrospective of the artist held at the Centre d'arts plastiques contemporains in Bordeaux, France in 1991-1992. The show was also demonstrated at the Museum of Modern Art in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the Queen Sofía Museum in Madrid, Spain and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
The same period, following the new trends of the digital revolution, Peter Halley started to add pearlescent and metallic paints to his abstract compositions. He experimented with bas-reliefs from fibreglass, with digital prints and web-based art, as well. Among the examples of this art were Superdream Mutation digital print (1993) and the online project dubbed Exploding Cell dedicated to the exhibition ‘New Concepts in Printmaking 1: Peter Halley” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1997.
During the middle 1990s, Peter Halley also took up the installations for various museums and galleries in which he united the materials from different media like painting, fibreglass relief sculpture and digitally generated wallpaper. One of such installations, Judgment day, was demonstrated during his solo exhibition at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. As an installation artist, Halley collaborated with French designer Matali Crasset and the Italian architect Alessandro Mendini.
In 1996, Peter Halley recommenced his writing activity by founding Index Magazine along with a curator and writer Bob Nickas. Till 2006, the periodical had published the interviews with notable cultural personalities, like Björk, Marc Jacobs or Scarlett Johansson. The following year, came the second collection of Halley’s essays titled Recent Essays.
Since the exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in 1986, Peter Halley has had exhibitions at many well-known American and European galleries, including Maruani & Mercier Gallery, Mary Boone Gallery, Sonnabend Gallery, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Jablonka Galerie, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, and Waddington Galleries. So, in 1989, his paintings were shown at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, at the Palace of Culture in Saint-Étienne, France and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
Despite his painting and writing activity, Peter Halley is also a talented teacher. During his career, he has transmitted his knowledge to the young generations of artists at the Columbia University and Yale University School of Art. So, in 2002, the artist occupied the post of the Director of the Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking department which he had held for nine years.
One of the recent exhibitions of the artist took place during the Art Basel fair at its Art Unlimited show in Basel, Switzerland in 2016.
Nowadays, Peter Halley lives and works in New York City.
Peter Halley is a modern artist who contributed to the development of the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s.
As an author, Halley has produced a huge number of the critical essays on art during his career and co-founded Index Magazine. His activity in this field was marked by the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association.
The functioning of the magazine was featured in the book ‘Index A to Z: Art, Design, Fashion, Film, and Music in the Indie Era’ produced by the influential Italian publishing company Arnoldo Mondadori Editore.
Peter Halley is also a talented art professor who taught such eminent artists like Mary Reid Kelly, Tala Madani, Keltie Ferris, Matt Connors, Ella Kruglyanskala, Anna Betbeze, Sacha Braunig, Ahmed Alsoudani, Njideka Akununyili Crosby, Abigail Deville, Jennifer Packer and Dana Schutz.
The artist’s heritage is nowadays preserved in various well-known galleries and museums all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Gallery in London, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, South Korea, the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux, France, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Castle of Rivoli, Turin, Italy and others.
Quotations:
"The modernism I grew up with was that it was spiritual. it was about a kind of purity and Emersonian transcendentalism… Feeling less and less comfortable with that, I decided that for me modernism was really about scepticism, doubt, and questioning. Things that we now say are part of a postmodern sensibility."
"My earlier paintings were rational, diagrammatic, and logical. Then I made a break around 1990, and since then they’ve become really exaggerated, almost parodic; and they aren’t analytical at all. In any case, I don’t see a great formal break in the '90s, although there is a psychological break."
"The nature of the social space we live in has changed immensely in the last thirty years since my project began. When I started my work in the ’80s, the limits of communications technology were the telephone, the fax machine, and cable television. In a very short time, we’ve gone from the era of limited, linear communications to the epoch of the web, Google, and Facebook."
"There was a traditional view that I grew up with. Artists had a high calling. They should not let things out of their studio that were bad."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Halley's geometric abstractions suggest diagrams of battery cells with conduits or prison cells with barred windows (that is, electrical or social systems), while their powerful fluorescent colors come from somewhere beyond art." Roberta Smith, New York Times
Interests
Writers
Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard
Connections
Peter Halley was married twice. His first wife became Caroline Churchill Stewart in 1982. The family produced one boy named Thomas and one girl named Isabel.
