Peter Halley: Big Paintings
February 6 through
May 31, 2015
Drawing on paintings from major public and private collections, Peter Halley: Big Paintings was a focused look at some of the artist’s most monumental paintings spanning his career from the 1980s to the present day. Since developing his iconic style in the early 1980s, Halley worked at the forefront of a group of artists reinvigorating American abstraction with a critical lens focused on contemporary culture. Organized by the Museum’s Assistant Curator Benjamin Colman, this exhibition of nine monumental paintings highlighted the evolution of Halley’s bold style and the sophistication of his ideas.
Using synthetic pigments and textured surfaces, Halley composes his paintings with a precise set of geometric icons—solid cells, gridded prisons, and linear conduits—that appear in different guises over the course of his career. Instead of using geometric forms to articulate abstract compositions, his work uses modern geometry as a raw source material that can be filled with meanings about interconnection, isolation, communication, technology, and the built environment drawn from everyday experiences. His practice often makes use of industrial paints in boldly artificial DayGlo, metallic, and pearlescent colors to evoke the intensity of industrial and commercial products. Many of the paintings in the exhibit used Roll-a-Tex, a paint additive used in home improvement projects to create textured walls. The resulting paintings challenge viewers with inbuilt contradictions: the meticulous geometries of Halley’s paintings vibrate with a luminous, artificial glow and rough surface.
