Peter Halley

International with Monument, New York
4 - 28 April, 1985

Halley’s first solo exhibition at the gallery links him with a group of New York Conceptual Artists including Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, Philip Taaffe, and Annette Lemieux. 

In The Village Voice Gary Indiana writes: “The arithmetic exactitude Halley uses to isolate surface areas looks like it’s at war with the oppressive heaviness of the stucco and the mind-numbing garishness of the Day-Glo … These pictures combine extreme ugliness with formal elegance. … [They] simulate uniformity, regimentation, coercion. They deal with the physical organisation of space, but also with the spatial organisation of consciousness.”

In the March 1986 essay in Kunstforum titled “Peter Halley: Brutal Dimensions”, Collins & Milazzo describes the exhibition as “…outstanding in having produced a certain unified or comprehensive effect, a highly reticulated Gesamtkunstwerk, in that all of the individual works in the show functioned powerfully as units within a visually calibrated whole.”

(Sources: Gary Indiana, “The Rest of Everything,” The Village Voice, 1985. Collins & Milazzo, “Peter Halley: Brutal Dimensions,” Kunstforum, March 1986.)