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Carl Solway Gallery
Peter Halley Editions Published by Carl Solway Gallery
Peter Halley Editions Published by Carl Solway Gallery
Peter Halley
Halley's prints have long focused on the image of the explosion, beginning with 1993 silkscreen print titled “Explosion.” The chaotic-expressive energy erupting from these vibrant images is in complete opposition to the strictly delimited, rectangular color planes of the cells, prisons and conduits that make up his painted works. In a very small edition of only 8 prints, the works are remarkable for their special, sophisticated printing technique and the high-quality presentation. In 2013, Carl Solway Gallery published his most recent edition of 16 unique low relief works titled “Exploding Cell" that were digitally designed and carved from polystyrene with a CNC router. "Explosion" describes the acute state of sudden resolution of the rigid diagrammatic structure, the prevailing enforced order that Peter Halley focuses on in his paintings. The explosion is thus a different, new state of the rigid 'Cells', and therein lies the artist’s intended ambivalence of the explosion: it is not destruction but liberation.
Image Credit:
Peter Halley, "Explosion #2"
[Peter Halley's works are] icons that reflect the increasing geometricization of social space in the world in which we live.
Italian art critic Demetrio Paparoni
Peter Halley in front of his work, “Peter Halley: Prints & Editions, 25 Years," Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, OH, September 6th, 2013
Peter Halley and Carl Solway, Carl Solway Gallery, IFPDA Print Fair, 2013
Peter Halley and his wife Ann Craven, Carl Solway Gallery, Pulse Miami Beach, 2015
Since the mid 1980s, Peter Halley has been recognized for his geometric paintings that reinterpret abstract art through the diagramming of contemporary social space.
Halley came to prominence through his early exhibitions at International with Monument in New York’s East Village in 1985 and 1986. Halley has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1991), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1992), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1992), the Des Moines Art Center (1992), the Dallas Museum of Art (1995), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (1998), the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1998), and the Butler Institute of American Art (1999).
Since the mid-1990s, Halley has produced site-specific installations for exhibitions and as permanent public works. These projects have been realized at the State University of New York, Buffalo (1998), the city library in Usera, Spain (2002), the Banco Suisso d’Italia Art Collection, Turin (2003), and the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in Texas (2005). In 2008, he completed a large permanent installation for the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Peter Halley is also a well respected teacher, publisher, and writer. From 2002-2011, he was Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. From 1996 to 2005 he published index magazine, featuring in-depth interviews with creative people from all fields. His writings, addressing post-structuralism, postmodernism and the digital revolution of the 1980s have been anthologized in Selected Essays: 1981-2001, published in 2013 by Edgewise Press. In 2001, Halley received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for excellence in art criticism from the College Art Association.
Born in New York City in 1953, Halley received his B.A. from Yale University in 1975 and his M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans in 1978. He lived in New Orleans in the latter half of the 1970s and has lived and worked in New York City since 1980.
