Peter Halley

Peter Halley is a contemporary American artist best known for his neon-colored geometric paintings. Since the early 1980s, Halley has honed in on motifs related to barred windows, prison cells, and the conduits and grids composing cities. “Space became geometrically differentiated and partitioned. Circulatory pathways, the omnipresent straight lines of the industrial landscape, were established to facilitate orderly movement,” he wrote. Born on September 24, 1953 in New York, NY he studied at Yale University and received an MFA at the University of New Orleans. After returning to New York, Halley helped define the Neo-Geo movement alongside Ashley Bickerton and Philip Taaffe, developing themes meant to critique the utopian vision of avant-garde idealists and the narratives produced by various cultural authorities. Alongside his career as a visual artist, Halley has written a number critical theory essays, including Beat, Minimalism, New Wave, and Robert Smithson from 1981. He continues to live and work in New York, NY with his wife the painter Ann Craven. Today, Halley's work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate Modern in London, among others.