This retrospective, Halley’s first one in Spain since his previous exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía in 1992, covers the artist’s entire career, from 1985 to 2024. The selection of twenty paintings, all belonging to Spanish collections – both private and public – has been made by Halley himself, who has also designed the installation plan.

Peter Halley’s appearance on the art scene at the beginning of the 1980s signalled a departure from the tradition of 20th-century abstract-geometric art – dominated until then by idealist and formalist concepts – towards new social concerns. In contrast with the pioneers of abstraction, for whom geometrical compositions had embodied an ideal rationality endowed with utopian value, Halley’s painting, and his critical and theoretical essays, reinterpret geometry as a means of social confinement and control that is filled with dystopian overtones. His palette of fluorescent Day-Glo colours, evoking the flow of energy of electronic screens, has distinguished Halley as one of the boldest and most experimental chromatists of our time.