Viewing Room | Peter Halley. Shadow Conspiracy, 1996

"I grew up with the notion that paintings create light, that picturing light was really important. As my work developed, I wanted to make paintings that created light, not natural light, but an artificial light."

- Peter Halley

A legitimate heir of American abstractionism and the central figure in the Neo-Geometric Conceptualism (Neogeo) movement, Peter Halley has masterfully reimagined the language of abstraction of early 20th century modernism.

"Nature, in Halley's work, is the thinking, feeling, acting human subject: an implied presence dwelling within the prisons and cells or laid to rest in a grave or underground chamber."

– Michelle Cotton

"(Anti) Social Networks: Technology and Social Relations in the Work of Peter Halley" in the exhibition catalogue Conduits: Paintings from the 1980s (Luxembourg: Mudam and Hatje Cantz, 2023)

Digital revolution and radically fast-growing technologies made a great impact on the visual arts, serving as an inspiration and source material for artists. The exhibition "Information Art: Diagramming Microchips" organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990 for the first time demonstrated the complex beauty of technologies, displaying the computer-generated diagrams from 1970s and 1980s along with real microchips and circuits. This presentation organically unveiled the parallels between the intricate layered patterns and colors of the machine-generated image and the geometric motifs found in abstract painting. Peter Halley's artwork from this decade came to symbolize a contemporary manifestation of a new concept from the age of emerging technology. Through the vocabulary of geometric abstraction, his works conveyed fresh perspectives on a dynamically evolving modern world, open to new artistic experiences.