Peter Halley is an American artist born in 1953 in New York.
A graduate of Yale University, New Haven, he completed his doctorate at the University of New Orleans in 1978, remaining there until 1980, before returning to New York.
Halley is among the major representatives of the neo-conceptualist movement of the 1980s. His artistic language is based on geometric abstraction and he usually creates paintings with square or rectangular shapes which he defines as "cells" or "prisons", which relate to each other through square section ducts, representing the growing geometrization of social space of the contemporary electronic, technological world. The minimalist geometry recalls the electronic circuit boards and the intense and brilliant colors used, obtained thanks to the use of Day-Glo colors, refer to the waves of luminous fluxes produced by the technological society.
He has exhibited in the most important international galleries and museum institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, the Folkwang Museum in Essen and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown.
Halley has written and published texts on art and culture, addressing the themes of structuralism, post-modernism and the digital revolution of the 1980s. In 2001, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association in the United States for his critical writing. He has taught at Columbia University, the University of California at Los Angeles and the School of Visual Arts. He was director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art (2002-2011).
He lives and works in New York.
