Peter Halley: Recent Paintings

Xippas is happy to present Peter Halley’s third personal exhibition in our Parisian space. The show features his most recent “constructor” paintings for the first time in France. This new body of work transcends the conventionality of a square or a rectangular shape and reorganizes the real each time in a different puzzle.

Openly multipart, Peter Halley’s new paintings revolt against flatness. They create an illusion of volume, if not a forced perspective, and emphasize even more their architectural character. Color blocks juxtapose like façades in a street-view of a modernist city. Towers rise up, scratching the sky, and seem to detach themselves from the ground (– or maybe it’s their foundation that gets shaky, like it’s usually the case when one deals with ivory towers). Gridded windows mysteriously glow and create a half-physical half-digital landscape, which could as well be a desktop, with multiple applications open at once. Out of nowhere, a Sci-Fi city appears. A city, inhabited by fluorescent lights and simulacra…

Peter Halley (born in 1953, New York) is one of the most emblematic artists of his generation. Since mid-1980s, he has been building, painting by painting, a whole abstract universe, with its own language and its own laws. In this universe, the squares are prisons, the cells remind of apartment houses, the stucco texture—of motel ceilings. There are also conduits, piping-in the reality and bringing life into the cells. Altogether, the elements create a highly regulated system: a “city” of abstraction governed by geometry and principles of surveillance and confinement.

Embedded in social, philosophical, conceptual context, Peter Halley’s geometric abstractions operate in the language of codes and tell stories about both the past and the future. Ideographic, the artworks refer to multiple realities at once, from architecture to art history to societal and digital organizations, and create wonderful alchemical riddles—for the viewer to solve.

Peter Halley had numerous institutional shows: CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (1991), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1992), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1992), Des Moines Art Center (1992), Dallas Museum of Art (1995), Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (1998), Museum Folkwang, Essen (1998), Butler Institute of American Art (1999), Disjecta interdisciplinary Art Center, Portland (2012), Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (2014), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016), The Lever House Art Collection, New York (2018), Museo Nivola, Sardinia and The Ranch, Montauk (2021).

A major personal exhibition of Peter Halley’s paintings is visible in Dallas Contemporary (Texas) until February 13, 2022.