Peter Halley : Conduits

This book looks back at the first ten years of Peter Halley's artistic career, which began with his birth in 1953. It brings together more than thirty paintings from public and private collections, placing well-known works beside drawings, sketches and handwritten notes that have not been seen before.

Halley studied at Yale and in New Orleans in the late 1970s, then moved back to New York in 1980 and settled in the East Village. That same year he produced his first images of confinement. Working within the language of geometric abstraction, he responded to the rigid character of bureaucratic spaces.

He also turned to unconventional materials. Roll-A-Tex, a paint additive that gives a ready-made surface texture, and fluorescent Day-Glo colors gave his paintings two distinct charges: the first suggested how mechanization had crept into physical contact, while the second pointed to technology's presence in the postmodern world.