Ocula Conversation Sandrine Colard on the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the largest Francophone nation in Africa with vast resources and nearly 80 million inhabitants, is a place where commodities play a vital role in the national economy and the country's significance on the world stage. This is the context from which the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale (24 October–24 November...
Ocula Report From 20 to 21 July 2019, Artspace Sydney held a two-day symposium that brought artists in conversation with leading curators, writers, activists, academics, diplomats, and journalists from across Asia. The symposium was the final chapter of the 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS exhibition, publication, website, and Instagram project. Instigated and...
Ocula News We Are Our Infrastructure, Argues Newly Announced Shanghai Biennale Chief Curator 13 December 2019 The Power Station of Art will make a fitting location for Andrés Jaque, whose past projects expose the politics concealed by buried pipes and managed cables. Spanish architect, writer, and curator Andrés Jaque has been named the chief curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale, which will take place at the Power Station of Art (PSA) from 13 November...
Ocula Insight Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy. Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Peter Halley (b. 1953, New York City), painter, printmaker and essayist, is known for depicting cells, prisons and conduits, rendered in fluorescent Day-Glo acrylic paint and Roll-a-Tex texture additive. His painting references formalists and minimalists such as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Piet Mondrian and Ad Reinhardt. His paintings are diagrams of the lived experience in a contemporary urban environment, in which social space is ever more divided and geometrised but individuals remain connected via 'conduits' of information flows, roadways and electrical grids. Halley came to prominence in the early 1980s with a group of artists which included Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach. Halley, and the group loosely labelled Neo-Geo, deployed a cool irony as an important counterpoint to the neo-expressionism prevalent at the time. Halley's concern with the effect of power relations on social and digital space owes much to the legacy of Andy Warhol.
Read MorePeter Halley studied at Yale University, where he gained his BA (1975), and at the University of New Orleans (MFA, 1978). He returned to New York in 1980, where his first solo exhibition was held at International with Monument, 1985. Since then he has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions for instance at the Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany, 1989, CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, 1991, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997 and Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan, 1998. Installations have been exhibited at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, 1995, the University of Buffalo, New York, 1997, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 1998 and Waddington Galleries, 1999, 2001. His published critical writings include two collections of essays from the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996 he founded index Magazine with Bob Nickas, which he edited until 2005. Between 2002 and 2011 Halley was Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art.
Peter Halley lives and works in New York City.
Text courtesy Waddington Custot.
Related Press Peter Halley at Sperone Westwater and Lever House Art in America : 1 February 2019 A central fixture in New York's conceptualist Neo-Geo scene of the 1980s, Peter Halley's work all but disappeared from the city's galleries by the start of the '90s, and for the subsequent decade was exhibited chiefly abroad. Sperone Westwater's recent show comprised ten paintings Halley made between 1997 and 2002 that are owned by Gian Enzo...
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