Peter Halley en España

The Casal Solleric selected twenty pieces for the exhibition, all from Spanish collections, both private and public, by the artist himself, who also designed the installation plan. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that includes texts by Enrique Juncosa, Guillermo Solana, and Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta.

Peter Halley’s emergence around 1980 rectified the tradition of 20th-century abstract-geometric art, which until then had been dominated by idealist and formalist conceptions, placing it in a social context. For the pioneers of abstraction, geometry embodied an ideal rationality endowed with utopian value; in both his painting and his critical and theoretical essays, Halley reinterpreted geometry as a means of confinement and social control, with dystopian features. The square, which had been the object of a quasi-religious cult from Malevich to Josef Albers, was humorously transformed into his icons of prisons, cells, and conduits. And in his compositions reminiscent of integrated circuits and flowcharts, Peter Halley anticipated the society of the digital age, marked simultaneously by systematic isolation and total interconnection. With his use of a fluorescent (Day-glo) color palette, which evokes the energy of electronic screens, Halley has distinguished himself as one of the most daring and experimental colorists of our time.