1. Peter Halley, Prison, 1989, Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, one panel, Collection CAPC Musée d'Art contemporain, Bordeaux, Photo: Steven Sloman
Beyond the geometric and the pure colors, Halley's works describe a changing world
Until the 15th of October 2023, the MUDAM, the museum of modern and contemporary art of Luxembourg present the work of Peter Halley, an important figure of American art and minimalist art.
And while the museum's collection acquired the work "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" in 1998, as part of the effort to create a modern and contemporary collection, the work was often overlooked and never explored deeper. But, since the new program director of the MUDAM steps in, she decided to undergo and continue its discussion with the artist, thus, this exhibition is the presentation of this 10 years project and the first retrospective survey of his work in over three decades.
The art world, discussions and relations
In 2013, Michelle Cotton (the curator of the exhibition) and Peter Halley (the artist), started out a decade-long conversation, the results of which is the exhibition "Conduits: Paintings from the 1980s" and the publication of the exhibition (edited by Hatje Cantz Verlag).
The show, and like the title entailed is not a full retrospective of his work since the start of his career, but more a less a focus exhibition on the paintings from the 80s, what we can call nowadays the "postmodernism" area.
During these decades, numerous evolutions happen such as the advent of computer, video games, globalisation, the opening of national borders and mobility, cinema and technical progress in technology, medicines, science, etc.
All of this context, sometimes quite complex is reflected onto the works of the artist, and he decided to crop this ideas and change it into blocks of colors, like their we're chips on a computer, or drawings from a computer system.
Beforehand, he decided to go over his hat of a painter and became an art critic and theorist who wrote it's seminal essay "Beat, Minimalism, New Wave and Robert Smithson" (1981). He also had a deep interest in the leading French theorists and critical writers of the 1980s – Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard – that fuelled his pictorial language he developed in the 1980s.
The construction of it's own language
2. Peter Halley, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, 1987, Acrylic, Fluorescent acrylic and Flash on canvas, Four attached panels, Collection Mudam Luxembourg, Acquisition 1998 - Apport FOCUMA. Exhibition view "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow", 20.06.2020 - 06.09.2020, Mudam Luxembourg, © Photo: Rémi Villaggi I Mudam Luxembourg
In the 1980s, Peter Halley was slowly developing his own style and methods of working, exploring his compositions with cutting, pasting and collaging materials, objects, images and informations, thus forming connections and equivalences in mainstream culture.
To clarify his intention, the artist decided to write and publish a series of texts, providing a discourse for his works, in essays such as "Beat, Minimalism, New Wave and Robert Smithson" (1981), "Against Postmodernism: Reconsidering Ortega" (1981) and "Some Notes on the Computer Landscape" (1993).
With those numerous essays, Halley's writing became the foundation of his intertextual approach to painting, offering a catalogue of ideas, references and source material in addition to an intellectual framework.
Short biography
Halley was born in New York in 1953, from a Polish-American mother and a Jewish-American father. His mother had moved to New York from Pennsylvania to work as a nurse, while his father’s ancestors were amongst the first Jews known to be living in New York.
Halley’s father, Rudolf Halley, trained as a lawyer and became chief counsel for the Truman Committee in Washington before returning to New York to work in private practice as a lawyer. He was elected as president of the City Council of New York and ran for mayor as a Liberal Party candidate, but died tragically at the age of forty-three when Peter was three years old.
Peter was raised by his mother, Janice, in an apartment in Midtown Manhattan. He left New York in 1967 to study at Phillips Academy.
He came back to New York in 1980 and started painting picture based on brick walls. Thus inspired by the history of geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism: the grids of Piet Mondrian, the black squares of Kazimir Malevich, the colour fields of Mark Rothko and the bands of colour that Barnett Newman "zipped" across his canvases, Halley's works was about the definition of a modern city with its gridded street plans, public infrastructures for utilities, brick walls, high-rise buildings, offices, factories and prisons and the invention and revolution of the computers.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Mudam Luxembourg
Date: 31.3.2023 - 15.10.2023
Curators: Michelle Cotton and Sarah Beaumont
Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Mudam
Mudam Luxembourg
Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3 Park Dräi Eechelen
L-1499 Luxembourg-Kirchberg
Phone: +352 45 37 85 1
Mail: info@mudam.com