Peter Halley, Born in 1953, American artist Peter Halley completed his painting education at Yale and New Orleans Universities and graduated in 1978. Halley came to the fore as part of the Neo-Conceptual artists in the East Village neighborhood of New York, including Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Annette Lemieux, Phillip Taaffe in the mid-1980s. Halley's paintings explore both the physical and psychological structures of the social sphere; It connects the hermetic language of geometrical abstraction influenced by artists such as Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly to the reality of urban space and the digital landscape.
Having chosen geometric abstraction as his starting point, one of the elements that inspired Halley during his student years is Islamic art. In the works carried out by the artist in the late 1970s, Islamic elements come to the fore. Halley expresses his works in these years with these words: "The currents I was interested in at that time rejected Western European art and the industrialized model of culture, and viewed non-Western, non-paternalistic resources as a basis for creating a cultural morality."
In 2000, a simplification begins to appear in Halley's works. Cells that changed shape, color and location on the canvas in the previous period no longer need circuits to communicate with each other. In the color palette, Day-Glo and pastel colors reappear.
Peter Halley's works are featured in both private and public collections across the globe, as well as in prominent museums. Key museum collections holding his works include the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Museum in London, Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles, Rubell Family Museum in Miami, and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux (CaPC).
