Painter, writer, teacher, and publisher: Peter Halley has been a widely influential figure in the international art world since his bold canvases were first shown in the early 1980s. Emerging from the East Village Neo-Geo scene, Halley soon became known for his aggressively colored Day-Glo paintings of square "cells" and rectilinear "conduits," titled with references ranging from the erudite to the pop.
While his paintings may initially recall the abstractions of Newman, Mondrian, and Albers, Halley's work breaks with the modernist agenda by insisting on a figurative referent, and, as curator and critic Dan Cameron has noted, Halley "effectively restate[s] the terms of abstraction in our time." For Halley, geometry is a profoundly social fact and his paintings are diagrams of the experience of space and time in contemporary society, depictions of loneliness and of connection.