A colorful square painting with gold and pink squares

Peter Halley
(Born 1953, US; lives and works in New York)
'Popism', 1997
Metallic, pearlescent acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas
190.5 x 188 cm
UBS Art Collection
© Peter Halley

Peter Halley is known for depicting cells, prisons and conduits, rendered in bright, fluorescent acrylic paint. His paintings, such as Popism (1997), are diagrams of the contemporary urban environment, in which social space is ever more divided and geometrized, but individuals remain connected via ‘conduits’ of information flows, roadways and electrical grids.

Halley’s paintings reference the work of formalist and minimalist artists such as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Piet Mondrian and Ad Reinhardt.
He came to prominence in the early 1980s with a group of artists, loosely labeled Neo-Geo, who deployed a cool irony as a counterpoint to the Neo-expressionist movement 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. He acknowledges this influence in Popism, which shares a title with Warhol’s 1980 book on the Pop phenomenon in New York in the 1960s.

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