Texts: Enrique Juncosa and Guillermo Solana
100 pages. Hardcover binding.
ISBN: 9788417173968
Bilingual edition in Spanish and English (and appendix of texts in Catalan)
Exhibition at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza from October 19, 2024, to January 19, 2025.
Peter Halley's arrival on the scene around 1980 rectified the tradition of 20th-century abstract-geometric art, which had until then been dominated by idealist and formalist conceptions, placing it in a social context. For the pioneers of abstraction, geometry embodied an ideal rationality endowed with utopian value; In both his painting and his critical and theoretical essays, Halley reinterprets geometry as a means of confinement and social control, with dystopian features. The square, which had been the object of a quasi-religious cult from Malevich to Josef Albers, is humorously transformed into his icons of prisons, cells, and conduits. And in his compositions reminiscent of integrated circuits and flowcharts, Peter Halley anticipates the society of the digital age, marked simultaneously by systematic isolation and total interconnectedness. With his use of a fluorescent (Day-glo) color palette, evoking the energy of electronic screens, Halley has distinguished himself as one of the most daring and experimental colorists of our time.
Peter Halley began as a radical independent and has worked to this day without the support of a mega-gallery, collaborating in each country with gallerists with whom he has a long-standing relationship of trust. Our exhibition highlights the exceptional reception his work has enjoyed in Spain for almost forty years.
