Peter Halley In Conversation with Emma Acker | Berggruen Gallery

On the occasion of Peter Halley, the artist's first solo exhibition with Berggruen Gallery, Halley sat down for a conversation moderated by Emma Acker, Curator of American Art at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. This talk took place on Wednesday, January 15, 2025.

A prominent figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s, Peter Halley uses geometric abstraction to explore the social, technological, and spatial linkages of the modern world. Halley’s paintings are based upon a visual pun suggesting the square as a representation of urban confinement. Taking Malevich’s square, Halley added stucco and bars to transform the modernist square into a prison, creating a two-dimensional icon of the physical isolation produced by technologically determined space and urban architecture. Halley’s fluorescent cells, made up of glowing yellows, pinks, greens, blues, and oranges, are layered with the readymade texture of Roll-a-Tex and arranged purposefully into slightly skewed grids. Halley’s recurring geometric iconography frenetically evokes the glow of today's digital forms, yet astonishingly, it was conceived prior to the advent of the ubiquitous glowing squares currently shaping modern life, such as the computer and telephone screen.

While Halley’s cells were once connected through his painted conduits, representing the infrastructure of networks, such as phone cords, television cords, building pipes, and roads, he unconsciously began to omit conduits as connective systems became cordless and fully digitized. Grounded in the theories of Foucault and Baudrillard, Halley's work parodies the hermetic spaces of modern existence, while embracing commercially manufactured materials and hyperreal color schemes. Playful and immersive, Halley’s day-glo colors distinguish him as an experimental and masterful chromatist, while his pictorial system which anticipated the burgeoning networks of contemporary life solidified the significance of the social commentary of his work. Inspired by the legacies of Andy Warhol, Piet Mondrian, Philip Guston, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and even Picasso, Halley draws from a wide range of cultural sources.

In addition to his artwork, Halley’s critical writings, which bridged French post-structuralist theories with the digital revolution and the visual arts, became seminal contributions to the art world. Halley founded Index Magazine, which operated from 1996 to 2005 and served as the Director of Graduate Studies in Painting at the Yale University School from 2002 to 2011. Halley received his MFA in painting from the University of New Orleans, and his BA in Art History from Yale University. Halley’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums and institutions, including a retrospective at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York among others.

Peter Halley: January 16 – February 27, 2025. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at [email protected].