Peter Halley (b. 1953, New York) is a leading figure in American postmodern painting. His work, which began in the 1980s, is among the most coherent and radical in redefining abstract language in relation to technological society and the architecture of control.
Educated at Yale (BA, 1975) and the University of New Orleans (MFA, 1978), Halley returned to New York in 1980 and quickly established himself as a key figure in the so-called "Neo-Geo," a movement that updated geometric abstraction from a conceptual, critical, and sociological perspective. During those years, he developed his celebrated visual vocabulary: "cells," "ducts," and "networks" that became pictorial metaphors for modern social prison, urban isolation, automation, and digital communication.
His rigorously flat canvases are made with fluorescent acrylics, industrial paints, and Roll-a-Tex—a material commonly used for wall coverings—underscoring his distance from traditional painting and asserting an industrial, impersonal dimension. With a deliberate use of artificial color and repeated patterns, Halley transforms abstraction into a tool for interpreting the symbolic structures of contemporary power.
In parallel with his painting, Halley was a lucid and influential thinker. He wrote numerous theoretical texts, some of which – such as“Notes on the Paintings”(1982) or“The Crisis in Geometry”– are considered manifestos of his generation. In his writings, he engages in dialogue with French post-structuralist philosophy (Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida), architecture, digital culture, and the media.
Between 1996 and 2001 he directedIndex Magazine, an independent cultural magazine dedicated to New York's underground art, fashion, design, and pop culture. From 2002 to 2011, he served as director of the Yale School of Art, where he influenced a new generation of American artists.
Today, Peter Halley continues to live and work in New York. His lucid and coherent work remains one of the most important visual reflections on the technological, spatial, and psychological conditions of contemporary life.
