(born 1953 in New York City, USA)
Blue Prison, signed and dated Peter Halley 2006 on the reverse, day-glo acrylic, pearlescent acrylic and roll-a-tex on canvas, 107 x 107 x 10 cm, on wood frame

Provenance:
Waddington Galleries Ltd, London (label on the reverse)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007–
European Private Collection

Peter Halley, painter, printmaker and essayist, is known for depicting cells, prisons and conduits, rendered in fluorescent ‘Day-Glo’ acrylic paint and ‘Roll-a-Tex’ texture additive. His painting references formalists and minimalists such as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Piet Mondrian and Ad Reinhardt. His paintings are diagrams of the lived experience in a contemporary urban environment, in which social space is ever more divided and geometrised but individuals remain connected via ‘conduits’ of information flows, roadways and electrical grids.
Halley came to prominence in the early 1980s with a group of artists which included Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach. Halley, and the group loosely labelled ‘Neo-Geo’, deployed a cool irony as an important counterpoint to the neo-expressionism prevalent at the time. Halley’s concern with the effect of power relations on social and digital space owes much to the legacy of Andy Warhol.
www.waddingtoncustot.com