Late in the modernist era, in the heart of the eclectic New York landscape of the 1980s, Peter Halley liberated geometry from its former conservative boundaries, rediscovering it for a whole generation of young artists. Using geometric patterns to express the physical and psychological aspects of urban environments in an era of expanding digital technology, his dynamic and radically vivid paintings embodied a bold concept of a New Abstraction.
In his work, Halley viscerally reproduces the modular patterns and borders that constrain the life and movement of modern urban man. Grids, cells, apartment buildings and thin channels – as dividers and bridges in the realities of our isolated existence.