Peter Halley: Maintain Speed

Painter, writer, teacher, and publisher: Peter Halley has been a widely influential figure in the international art world since his bold canvases were first shown in the early 1980s. Emerging from the East Village Neo-Geo scene, Halley soon became known for his aggressively colored Day-Glo paintings of square "cells" and rectilinear "conduits," titled with references ranging from the erudite to the pop.
While his paintings may initially recall the abstractions of Newman, Mondrian, and Albers, Halley's work breaks with the modernist agenda by insisting on a figurative referent, and, as curator and critic Dan Cameron has noted, Halley "effectively restate[s] the terms of abstraction in our time." For Halley, geometry is a profoundly social fact and his paintings are diagrams of the experience of space and time in contemporary society, depictions of loneliness and of connection.

Part of the "Neo-Geo" movement of the early 1980s including influential American artists such as Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton, and Jeff Koons, Halley's work has since become more playful and decorative. His one person print show in 1998 at MOMA earned rave reviews. Halley has had one person shows at the following museums and galleries amongst many others: MOMA, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Des Moines Art Center; Gagosian Gallery, New York; Rhona Hoffman Chicago; Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Halley currently teaches at both Yale University and UCLA. He lives and works in New York City, where in addition to his art work, he is the publisher of index magazine.

Contributing Authors:

Rudi Fuchs has been the Director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam since 1993.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve has written for Artforum, Art in America, Parkett, and Artbyte. She is currently writing and producing a film about Matthew Barney's Cremaster project.

Susan Kandel is the editor of the international journal art/text, and for the past decade, has written art reviews for the Los Angeles Times.

Makiko Matake has curated major exhibitions in Japan, including the 2nd Kitakyushu Biennale and Peter Halley: Painting as Sociogram 1981-97. She teaches American Art at the Kitakyushu University.

Demetrio Paparoni is the editorial director of Tema Celeste, a contemporary Italian art magazine he founded in 1983. At the 1993 Venice Biennale, he curated Abstracta in the Italian Pavilion.

David Rimanelli is a Contributing Editor of Artforum. His book on recent trends in pop art is forthcoming from Thames and Hudson.

Cornelia Blatter & Marcel Hermans are the founder of COMA, an interdisciplinary art/design studio in New York and Amsterdam. Their projects include book and magazine designs for a variety of publishers and museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Monacelli Press in New York and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.