(born in New York 1953)
Firewall, 2007, signed, dated twice Peter Halley 2007 on the reverse, acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, pearlescent acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 183 x 213.5 x 9.5 cm, on stretcher

We are grateful to Peter Halley Studio, New York, for the kind assistance in the cataloguing of this work.

Provenance:
Gallery Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris
Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

“Moving back to New York City and thinking about how the city was structured and how contemporary life was structured, I began to feel that geometry was not an ideal platonic form but rather that geometric abstraction was a reflection of that late industrial burgeoning digital society that we are living in. So that when I put a square into a painting, I didn’t call it a square anymore. But it was a cell. You were meant to feel that was a container. The other squares had bars on them, so they were jails. The two characters in the paintings are the cells and the prisons. Cells being purely covered with the stuck on material Roll-A-Tex. And the jails had bars on them. They kind of look like diagrammatic cartoon jails.”
(Peter Halley, In: talk Art Podcast, 8 December 2022. Interview with Russell Tovey and Robert Diament)
Peter Halley is one of the most recognisable American contemporary artists. The artist developed his signature painting style early on, when he moved back to his hometown of New York City in the 1980s.
Peter Halley’s paintings consist of three elements: a prison, a cell, and conduits connecting the two. They represent his view of today’s society; a society full of technological innovations and people who are physically separated but somehow connected via technology. There is also a gender element as Halley associates the form of a square with an unkempt male figure, thus critiquing toxic masculinity. The chosen imagery of prisons is unsurprising as the artist is obsessed with the topic of claustrophobia.
The paintings are flat in terms of composition, but Halley’s use of flamboyant colours creates a lively space. They are composed according to the principles of geometric abstraction but rendered unique through the use of fluorescent colours. Halley’s paintings became even more complex with the invention of the internet. The conduits seem to go everywhere on the canvas, as Halley transferred the sudden explosion of information into his artworks.
Halley stopped drawing with pencil in 1993 and nowadays sketches his artworks with Adobe Illustrator, helping him add another level of complexity. His artworks are produced with the help of his studio assistants as their production process is very labor intensive. They often end up with 50 coats of paint which are up to 3-5mm thick. Peter Halley defines his artistic role as one of composer and educator.
His interest in the rise of digital culture is represented in the present artwork’s title Firewall. Firewall represents the typical duality of Halley’s artworks between the seriousness of composition with its straight lines and the positive energy which emerges through his flamboyant colour choice. The viewer is captured within the painting, moving from one cell to another through the conduits – a little like playing Pac-Man inside the painting.