Assembling thirty key works from public and private collections, ‘Peter Halley. Conduits: Paintings from the 1980s’ presents paintings alongside previously unseen drawings, sketches and notes from the first decade of the artist’s career.

During the 1980s Peter Halley developed a signature vocabulary that he has used in his work now for over forty years. Redeploying the language of geometric abstraction, he developed a pictorial system of ‘prisons’, ‘cells’ and ‘conduits’ that enabled him to produce diagrammatic paintings representing social subjects.

With these works he addressed issues that are fundamental to art produced over the last two centuries: namely, urbanisation and industrialisation within a post-industrial society marked by technological change. Working at the advent of the internet and at a time that saw the mass adoption of personal computers and video games, he described the physical and bureaucratic environments of the late twentieth century and the systemic logic that found expression within the architectures of a new digital space.

“Geometry is the language of the managerial-professional class. It is the language of the corporation and flow charts; it is the language of urban planning and of communications.”
– Peter Halley

The exhibition and accompanying publication are realised in close cooperation with the artist. It includes works from the collections of Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover; Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rennie Collection, Vancouver; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Mudam Collection.