Peter Halley: Personal Exhibition

His works combine rigorous geometry with artificial neon glow, creating a visual tension between the formal austerity of a museum object and the bright palette of materials drawn from mass culture. Halley uses saturated industrial paints — fluorescent DayGlo, metallic, and pearlescent pigments — along with Roll-a-Tex, a paint additive that gives the surface a rough texture. He calls these materials a “hyper-realization” of modernism’s chromatic aspirations, and their brightness a form of “low-budget mysticism,” deliberately contrasting with traditional art conventions.

From 2002 to 2011, Halley served as Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art.

Over the course of a long and successful career, Halley’s museum exhibitions and public projects have served as bridges between architectural spaces of the past and present. His works have been featured at the São Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial, and are held in the collections of major institutions including:

· Musée d’Art Contemporain (Bordeaux, France)

· Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain)

· Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

· Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA, USA)

· Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX, USA)

· Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York, NY, USA)

· Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (Kitakyushu, Japan)

· Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany)

· Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, OH, USA)

· Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne (Saint-Étienne, France)

· Museum of Art in Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA, USA)

· Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany)