He Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum It traces the career of the American painter Peter Halley in an exhibition of twenty works chosen by the artist himself and which can be visited in Madrid until January 19, 2025.
The sample, curated by the Museum’s artistic director, Guillermo Solana is Halley’s first retrospective in Spain since the one organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 1992 and covers the artist’s entire career, from 1985 to 2024.
The twenty paintings belong to Spanish collectionsboth private and public, and have been selected by the artist himself, who has also designed the installation plan.
After passing through Madrid, ‘Peter Halley in Spain’ It can be seen in Casal Solleric (Palma de Mallorca), where it can be seen in the spring of 2025.
Halley’s entry on the scene, around 1980, rectified the tradition of abstract geometric art of the 20th century, dominated until then by idealist and formalist conceptions, placing it in a social context, as explained by the gallery in a statement.
Precisely, both in his painting and in his critical and theoretical essays, Halley reinterprets geometry as a means of confinement and social control, with dystopian features.
Furthermore, with his use of a fluorescent color palette (Day-glo), which evokes the energy of electronic screens, Halley has distinguished himself as “one of the most audacious and experimental colorists” of contemporary times, says the Thyssen- Bornemisza.
The exhibition highlights the reception that his work has enjoyed in Spain for almost forty years, where he exhibited for the first time in 1986, participating in ‘Art and its double: a New York perspective’a collective that showed the panorama of the New York scene at that time at the Madrid Pension Fund Foundation.
Shortly after, in 1992, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presented a retrospective that had been seen before in other European museums in Bordeaux (APC Musée d’Art Contemporain), Pully/Lausanne (FAE Musée d’Art Contemporain) and, later, in Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum).
Halley’s canvases are found in Spanish public collections, such as those of the Reina Sofía Museum, the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation or the IVAM (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern), and in private collections, and they have a permanent installation in the Library Public José Hierro de Usera, in Madrid (2002), based on the story by Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel.