PETER HALLEY

The Mirror Stage
NSU Art Museum, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

The Mirror Stage thrusts viewers into a mirrored universe comprised of two nearly identical spaces, each accessed through a separate door at opposite ends of a large rectangular gallery. A solid dividing wall through the center of the gallery prevents viewers from passing between the two spaces, forcing them to move back and forth through the two entrances in order to experience the installation in its entirety. Halley further amplified the mirroring effect of the two spaces by laminating walls with highly reflective vinyl. Monumental neon-colored canvases and grids of brightly hued textured panels add to the viewer’s vivid and uncanny experience as they navigate real, pictorial, and virtual space.

Conduits: Paintings from the 1980s
Musée d’art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg

Assembling thirty key works from public and private collections, this retrospective survey curated by Michelle Cotton presents paintings alongside previously unseen drawings, sketches and notes from the first decade of Peter Halley’s career. An exhibition catalogue with essays by Paul Pieroni, Tim Griffin, and Michele Cotton accompanies the exhibition.

InterACTION
Fondazione Made in Cloister, Naples

Interaction, curated by Demetrio Paparoni, was conceived to highlight the interaction among the works of 27 international artists.
Halley designed a site-specific digital wall mural in response to the historical architecture of the 14th century Cloister.

CELL GRIDS
Dallas Contemporary, Dallas

CELL GRIDS presents a unique series of paintings made from 2015 to the present. The exhibition showcases a surprising vein of Halley’s work, paintings in which one element of his distinctive iconography—his intensely colored rectilinear “cells”—is isolated and arranged into syncopated grids, bringing his work into dialogue with the structural grid of classic Modernism as represented in the work of Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol and others.

Halley designed the installation in which the paintings were hung on a series of cubic structures aligned to create intersecting “streets”.

ANTESTERIA
Museo Nivola, Orani, Sardinia

ANTESTERIA, named for the Athenian festival honoring Dionysus and the arrival of spring, transformed the interior of the old public washhouse that is used as an exhibition space by Museo Nivola in Orani, a small town in central Sardinia. Every element of Halley’s digitally printed mural was taken from one of his previous installations or artworks, creating an autobiographical history of the artist’s iconography. The building’s similarity to a church in shape and proportion inspired the composition of the installation. A digitally-printed metallic mural on the end wall was inspired by Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Halley’s apartment house imagery from the early 1980s was used to create a stained-glass effect on the windows. The placement of curvilinear patterns derived by bending the artist’s rectilinear paintings framed the curvature of windows, evoking a Baroque church. The result is an immersion in the Dionysian climate of the Mediterranean, dreamed through the filter of 21st-century technology and bathed in tinted, almost psychedelic light.

Heterotopia II
Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

In Heterotopia II, Halley created a free-standing structure with a series of 9 rooms around a central core, each room featuring a single painting. In this installation, Halley conflates painting and architecture; the paintings can be read as floorplans for the installation and the installation as a three dimensional version of the paintings. There are several architectural references. The exterior’s yellow Roll-a-tex surface gives the feeling of a building by Luis Barragan. Inside, a large round window echoes Louis Kahn’s library in Exeter, New Hampshire.

QUBE
Collaboration with Lauren Clay
Galerija Kula, Split, Croatia

Galerija Kula is situated in one of the remaining watchtowers of the 4th-century Diocletian’s Palace in Split. QUBE was a collaborative project between Halley and the sculptor Lauren Clay. Clay's design for the freestanding pavilion played on elements of classical Roman architecture and was intended to frame Halley’s digital prints on gold foil. His images were inlaid on the interior and exterior panels of the marbled pavilion, bringing a fin-de-siècle aesthetic to the work.

Heterotopia I
with work by Lauren Clay, Andrew Kuo, and RM Fischer
The Art Gallery of the Academia di Belle Arti di Venezia

Presented by Flash Art in conjunction with the Venice Biennale, this installation was located in the Magazzino del Sale, a 15th-century salt warehouse now used as a gallery by the School of Fine Art. The title Heterotopia I, derives from a term coined by Michel Foucault, describing a space which is a universe unto itself, separate from the outside world. Responding to the narrow, tunnel-like space of the historical structure, Halley constructed an episodic narrative of eight sequential rooms, three of which incorporated contributions from artists Andrew Kuo, Lauren Clay, and R.M. Fischer. Critic Elena Sorokina contributed the wall texts. Identifying Venice as a living museum of European culture, each room recalled a different aspect of this history. The first room resembled an Egyptian tomb with digital renderings of Halley’s drawing studies from the 80s functioning as hieroglyphics. The gold columns in the second room referenced the courtyard of a Roman villa, with a flat fluorescent blue rectangle on the ground simulating a pool of water.

Biel Train Station
Biel, Switzerland

Located on the Biel platform of the Swiss railway network, Halley lines the walls of a small booth with imitation brick, blocking its windows and obscuring the previously visible space within.

Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm

In this gallery exhibition, each painting was surrounded by a large digital print derived from the artist’s exploding cell imagery, situating Halley’s rectilinear paintings within an arabesque, Baroque-inspired frame. Textured silver mylar covered the large walls with a pattern of digitally printed exploding cells that interacted with the paintings to create a colorful kaleidoscopic effect. Three adjacent ante-rooms were filled with floor-to-ceiling murals, echoing the prison grid paintings that Halley has been making since 2000.

New York, New York
Lever House Art Collection, New York

The large‐scale installation encompasses a ground‐floor lobby of Lever House, the iconic modernist building on Park Avenue, in addition to the dramatic block‐long band of windows ringing the building’s second floor were illuminated with yellow light. The exhibition includes six large shaped‐canvas paintings as well as a sequence of digitally‐generated mural works hidden within a seemingly impenetrable block‐like central structure.

Au-Dessous / Au-Dessus
Galerie Xippas, Paris

The unusual layout of Galerie Xippas—a basement gallery connected by a staircase to a sunlit first floor gallery—informed the configuration of Halley’s installation. The light-filled upper gallery held four of Halley’s bright prison paintings. In the basement gallery, Halley exhibited grid paintings created using a limited primary-color palette in homage to Mondrian. The paintings were displayed on top of a montage of texts written by curator Jill Gasparina covering all four walls. Gasparina’s texts interrogated the idea of space and enclosure, linking Halley’s work to architecture through tombs, prisons, caves, and subterranean chambers, while the placement of the grids of text echoed the gridded composition of the paintings. In the staircase connecting the upper and lower galleries, Halley attempted to create the feeling of the interior of an Egyptian tomb. The acid-yellow walls were covered with digitized renderings of Halley’s diagrammatic studies from the 1980s, used to create an ideographic hieroglyphic-like language. Finally, the ceiling of the staircase was covered by blue digital prints derived from a motif located on the ceiling of Nefertari’s tomb in Egypt.

Emerald City
K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong

Presented with nearly 30 other artists, Emerald City examines the idea of translation within geometry and compares two important concepts in cultural translation—‘transparency’ and ‘opacity’—by bringing together an impressive array of works of contemporary art including paintings, videos, sculptures, and site-specific installations by artists from China and other parts of the world. Beginning with basic geometric concepts that represent spatial relations, such as dots and lines, ratio, and distance, the exhibition looks into the structures and meanings of the cosmos, land and sea, architectural environments, the human body, and other physical and abstract spaces to shed light on the stories of cultural coexistence amid globalisation. The world as we perceive is hardly symmetrical to the world as it is. In the literary classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, everyone in Emerald City is required to put on a pair of green-tinted spectacles intended for filtering out the brilliant radiance of the utopia. Our pursuit of universal knowledge through geometry nonetheless prevents us from seeing the things we want to know. Not only does the exhibition demonstrate how geometry shapes our conception of the world, it also inspires us to look at the world outside the confines of geometric thinking.

Greene Naftali, New York

For his first exhibition at Greene Naftali, Halley assembled a complex multi-part installation integrating painting, wall-sized digital prints, sculpture, and sound.

Paradise Lost
Collaboration with Lauren Clay
Paradise City, Korea

Made for a collaborative installation with wallpaper by Lauren Clay, Paradise Lost I - IV is comprised of 4 paintings, Paradise Lost I, II, III, and IV, 2017. Lauren Clay’s wallpaper is titled, “Between Urras and Anarres.”

The Schirn Ring
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

Halley’s installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt curated by Max Hollein in the summer of 2016 was inspired by the cylindrical architecture of the Schirn entrance rotunda. Realizing that the space would be filled by the midsummer sun coming through the glass ceiling, Halley used the intense light as the driving element in his installation. Halley covered the glass ceiling with translucent yellow film that saturated the space with yellow light, reflecting off the rotunda’s windows that he covered with metallic prints, and onto the yellow painted floor. The overall effect was a space filled with an immersive yellow light completely different from the unfiltered sunlight just outside.

The Weak Force
Basel Unlimited

Halley installed large paintings composed of brick-like blocks of intense color on wallpaper printed with schematic images of explosions. Reversing conventional expectations of figure and ground (or picture and wall), Halley wryly links the sundered histories of geometric abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop, intimating the destruction that underlies the solidity of what we construct.

Big Paintings
Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut

Peter Halley: Big Paintings is a focused look at some of the artist’s most monumental paintings spanning his career from the 1980s to the present day.

Galerie Senda at ARTBO
Bogota, Columbia

Galeria Senda presented a group of Halley’s small Prison paintings in front of digitally printed wallpaper designed by Halley.

PRISONS
Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany

Located at the Altes Straßenbahndepot (Old Tram Depot), Halley designed the exhibition space to exhibit 34 of his small “prison paintings”.

OMG!
Collaboration with Alessandro Mendini
Cartier Foundation, Paris

Halley collaborated on this installation with Mendini for the collection of the Cartier Foundation in Paris.

Since 2000
Musee d'Art Moderne, Saint Etienne Metropole, France

Curated by Lorand Hegyi, the exhibition was part of a festival, “The New York Moment”, that included, in addition to Halley’s exhibition, an exhibition by Joel Shapiro and concert by Phillip Glass. Glass, Halley, and Shapiro participated in a panel discussion in conjunction with the opening.

Collaboration with Alessandro Mendini
Mary Boone Gallery, New York

In Halley’s second collaborative installation with Alessandro Mendini, nine new Halley paintings were installed on digitally-printed modular wallpaper designed by Alessandro Mendini. 

PRISON
Disjecta, Portland, Oregon

Organized by Jenene Nagy, this installation featured a floor-to-ceiling digital mural composed of stacked prisons purposed from painting compositions. Colored lighting was used to intensify the effect.

Judgment Day
Personal Structures
Palazzo Bembo, Venice

Presented in Venice’s 15th-century Palazzo Bembo, Halley’s installation Judgement Day served as an important component of Personal Structures, an ancillary exhibition of the city’s 54th Biennale's  International Art Exhibition.

Presented in Venice’s 15th-century Palazzo Bembo, Halley’s installation Judgment Day served as an important component of Personal Structures, an ancillary exhibition of the city’s 54th Biennale International Art Exhibition. Halley’s kaleidoscopic digital mural drew inspiration from the grids of mirrored marble on the facade of the Basilica of San Marco and the damask textiles of the early 20th-century Venetian fashion designer Mariano Fortuny. Halley digitally manipulated his iconic exploding cell imagery by superimposing translucent layers of mirrored, quartered, or internally rotated motifs arranged in a recursive pattern.

Curated by Karlyn De Jongh and Sarah Gold as the finale stage of Halley’s participation in an ongoing project, Personal Structures, that began for Halley in April of 2009 at a symposium in New York, the installation measures over 875 cubic feet.

Drawings, Four Decades
Gering and Lopez Gallery, New York

The exhibition showcased a selection of drawings spanning Halley’s career, emphasizing his exploration of geometric abstraction and his innovative use of color and form. From his early Kodaliths, created on photo-sensitive Mylar, to his ongoing acrylic-on-printed-paper pieces, the drawings reflect Halley’s continuous engagement with themes of architecture, technology, and the systems that shape contemporary life.

The Gallatin Cycle
The Gallatin School, New York University

Under the patronage of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Halley created a permanent installation for the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Spanning 5,000 square feet (approximately 1,524 square meters), the installation features vibrant, wall-sized digital inkjet prints, enriching the academic setting with an immersive, thought-provoking experience.

The Big Bang
Museo Carlo Bilotti, Rome

As part of an exhibition exploring the complex relationship between science, art, the cosmos, and the human soul, Peter Halley’s installation at Museo Carlo Bilotti featured two grids of his iconic exploding cell motif. Each grid was composed of 12 vibrant, color-saturated panels, radiating energy and intensity. The work draws on mathematical models to compare the measurements of the world and humanity to theoretical schemes, showcasing Halley’s dynamic use of color and his continued exploration of abstract cosmology. The exhibition also included works by American and international artists such as James Turrell, Robert Longo, Alberto Di Fabio, and Domenico Bianchi.

Collaboration with Alessandro Mendini
Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia

Halley’s first collaborative installation with Italian architect Alessandro Mendini took place at Galleria Massimo Minini in Brescia, Italy. The artists collaborated by email to refine the scale and placement of each of their works. The installation featured Halley’s paintings on canvas against a backdrop of wall paintings by Mendini. In a back and forth dialogue between the two, Halley responded to Mendini’s oeuvre by creating six paintings that were then a source for Mendini’s use of scale and color in his wall paintings.

A Rebours
Collaboration with Matali Crasset
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

Halley first learned about Matali Crasset’s work when she was interviewed for INDEX magazine in 2005 and immediately felt an affinity with her use of color and geometry. After meeting the designer, Halley invited Crasset to collaborate on an installation at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in 2007. Crasset covered the walls with fields of colorful vertical lines and abstracted trees. Her drawings reached the full height of the gallery’s five-meter-tall walls, dwarfing Halley’s large rectilinear paintings, as if the structures had been magically enveloped by an ethereal forest. Crasset’s delicate lines were made by snapping strings covered with colored chalk against the walls, a technique used by masons and builders to quickly inscribe a straight line on a long wall. The show’s title, À Rebours (Against Nature) references Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 novel. Halley and Crasset created an imagined environment embodying the complex intertwining of geometry and nature.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

Exploring what Halley terms a "hallucinated hyper-determined panopticality," this installation featured large-scale paintings composed of multiple canvases, layered over expansive wall-sized digital prints. The main exhibition space was transformed into an immersive environment, saturated with vibrant color and repetitive patterns, creating a dynamic and enveloping experience for viewers.

Outside Security
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport

Located in Terminal D at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport (DFW), renowned for its impressive collection of public art, Halley’s monumental painting enhances the airport's cultural landscape, spanning 17 x 40 feet (approx. 5 1/2 x 13 1/2 meters). His visual language mirrors the complex networks of modern infrastructure, offering travelers a thought-provoking experience that draws connections between the major center of global transit and broader societal systems.

Banco Suisso d'Italia, Turin

The offices of BSI Turin were located in a wing of Palazzo Carpano, an 18th-century building whose interior retained its original decorative architectural detail. Invited to execute a wall installation in the building’s glass-enclosed gallery, Halley digitally generated stencils to create large-scale hand-painted murals in silver and gold that interacted with the space’s existing late-baroque frescoes, weaving the virtual into the historical residence.

Nine Explosions
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

As part of Halley’s inclusion in We Love Painting at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Halley creates 9 Explosions, 2002, a 29 ½ ft x 34 ft digital image (9 vinyl banners) executed in sign painter's enamel on vinyl tarp mounted on aluminum armature, commissioned by the Misumi Corporation for the exhibition.

Mary Boone Gallery, New York

In Halley’s first installation at Mary Boone Gallery, he presented a collection of large-scale paintings on a background of wall sized digital murals of his iconic exploding cell motif.

Biblioteca Pública José Hierro, Usera, Spain

Halley’s various collaborations with architects began in 2002 with a commission from Abalos and Herreros for their recently completed public library in a working-class neighborhood populated by university students in the district of Usera, in Madrid. The architects wanted to cover the interior walls with text imagery and invited Halley to undertake the project. Halley designed wall murals using the text from Jorge Luis Borges’ story, La Biblioteca de Babel. He digitally mutated the text until it achieved a look he describes as ‘futuristic Arabic typography.’ Halley was fascinated by how Jorges’ text, though written in European letters, gained the aspect of Arab calligraphy, referencing the Moorish rule in Spain that ended four hundred and fifty years ago.

Waddington Galleries, London

Halley’s first solo exhibition in the U.K. since his 1989 show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, this installation at Waddington Galleries reflected the dramatic changes in his work during the last decade. The austerity of his 80s paintings had been replaced by complex compositions bursting with color, including metallic and pearlescent pigments. Following up on his approach to the installation at Museum Folkwang Essen the previous year, the artist continued to juxtapose walls covered with grids of silkscreen prints and digital prints. The intimate dimensions of the Waddington space created a more textured dialogue between Halley’s visual languages.

In this installation, Halley also added a new element to his wall mural vocabulary. None of the paintings were hung on the grids of prints. Instead, they were framed by linear compositions of pale yellow lines painted directly on the walls that were enlargements of the compositions of the paintings themselves, thus framing the paintings with linear versions of the paintings themselves.

Bilder der 90er Jahre
Museum Folkwang Essen

A survey of Halley’s work from the 1990s, this installation featured his increasingly complex recent paintings that now included metallic and pearlescent pigments. These were hung on grids of large-scale silkscreen and digital prints. Two walls were also devoted to wall-scale flowcharts. Halley’s impulse to transform the architecture led him to challenge the aesthetic of the modular modernist space by filling the walls with over-the-top montages of paintings with prints behind them. The Baroque opulence satisfied Halley’s desire for a sense of visual overload. This exhibition was also the first to display Halley’s limited edition Static Wallpaper, published by Edition Schellman, Munich, as part of Schellman’s “Wallworks” series in which Schellman asked artists to make wall-sized work as editions.

New Concepts in Printmaking I
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Featured are Halley’s innovative work with wall-size digital prints, and Exploding Cell, an online interactive print project still accessible on the Museum of Modern Art’s website. The first digital artwork to be acquired by MoMA. (http://www.moma.org/interactives/projects/1997/Halley/)

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

Halley’s first European installation at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris brought together a diverse array of media, including paintings, wall-sized flowcharts, a large-scale silkscreen print, and a striking grid of prints covering the gallery's end wall. This multifaceted presentation interwove Halley’s distinctive visual languages: silkscreened cartoons, hard-edge paintings inspired by the principles of Neoplasticism, and algorithmic flowcharts rendered in French, a nod to the European origins of Structuralist thought. The installation constructed a rich and layered narrative, inviting viewers to explore the connections between these varied media and their semiotic elements.

Encounters 6: Peter Halley
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas

Utilizing Halley’s characteristic visual language of cells, conduits, and grids, his first large-scale multimedia installation included paintings, large-scale silkscreen prints, fiberglass relief sculptures, and digitally-generated wall size flowcharts.

 Encounters 6 is a revised version of a 1994 cancelled Gagosian exhibition.

Peter Halley and Ettore Sottsass
Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York

Halley’s paintings, Power User and Server (both 1995) appear alongside Sottsass’ ceramics and cabinets, creating a compelling dialogue between art and design. This pairing highlighted the shared interest of both artists in systems, form, and the interplay of function and aesthetics, offering an exploration of how visual language shapes our understanding of contemporary culture.

Sonnabend Gallery, New York

Halley's second exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery showcased his evolving exploration of geometric abstraction and its relationship to modern social and architectural spaces. The show featured his iconic motifs of cells and conduits, rendered in fluorescent colors and textured with Roll-a-Tex, emphasizing themes of isolation, connectivity, and control. This pivotal exhibition marked Halley’s growing recognition as a leading figure in the Neo-Conceptual art movement, offering a bold critique of contemporary systems through his visually striking and conceptually layered compositions.

Sonnabend Gallery, New York

Halley’s first exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery featured his signature motifs of cells and conduits. These works reflected Halley’s critical engagement with the structures of modern life, exploring themes of confinement, urban isolation, and technological connectivity.

International with Monument, New York

Halley’s first solo exhibition at International With Monument in 1985 was a pivotal moment for both his career and the New York art scene. The gallery, co-founded by Meyer Vaisman, Elizabeth Koury, and Kent Klamen, was a vital space for emerging artists, known for its experimental energy and influence on the downtown art movement of the 1980s.

Halley presented his early geometric abstractions featuring cells and conduits, rendered with fluorescent paint and Roll-a-Tex. These works established Halley as a key figure in the Neo-Conceptual movement while solidifying the gallery’s role as a launchpad for groundbreaking talent.