L'Almanach 26 : Peter Halley | Consortium Museum

Peter Halley (1953, New York, États-Unis)

Born in New York in 1953, Peter Halley rose to prominence on the international art scene in the 1980s as one of the leading artists of a new wave of abstraction. This abstract art trend features geometric forms as metaphors for contemporary society. The New York painter is well-known for his “flashy” paintings of rectangular or square units, or “cells,” connected by lines, or “conduits,” representing allegories of prison. In the wake of “French Theory” thinkers—such as Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard—Halley explores the relationships between social organization, power, and space in his paintings.

The works on display here demonstrate how Peter Halley revives and extends the forms he developed several decades ago.

In Altar (2025), he appropriates the form of the traditional altarpiece. This multi-panel painting unfolds in three ways, successively revealing a wall of fake gilded bricks, vividly colored monochrome paintings, and an explosion of lines converging toward a concentric center. The outer panels are reminiscent of the early brick wall paintings the artist created in 1980 and 1981, as is the paint in metallic hues he used in the cells of some paintings from the 2000s. These outer panels open up to reveal four monochrome canvases painted with Roll-a-Tex. The use of this industrial paint, which creates a synthetic stucco effect, and the fluorescent colors are recurring elements in his work. Last but not least, the final element—the exploding cell—

has also been a recurrent subject in the artist’s installations since the 1990s. The altarpiece, whose very form carries religious symbolism, stands apart from the artist’s prior works while also aligning with the same subjects and techniques.

This exhibition features a body of work that is both a departure from our knowledge of the artist’s oeuvre and a self-referential system harking back to earlier works.