Peter Halley The Mirror Stage

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. - NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will present Peter Halley: The Mirror Stage, an immersive site-specific installation by New York painter Peter Halley (b. 1953, New York, New York) beginning September 8, 2024, through January 12, 2025. This spectacular exhibition has been specially commissioned for the Museum’s expansive second-floor galleries.

The Mirror Stage thrusts viewers into a mirrored universe comprised of two nearly identical spaces, each accessed through separate doors at opposite ends of a large rectangular gallery. A solid dividing wall inserted at the center of the gallery prevents viewers from passing through from either side, forcing them to move back and forth through the two entrances in order to experience the installation in its entirety. Halley further amplified the mirroring effect of the two spaces by laminating walls with highly reflective vinyl. Monumental neon-colored canvases and grids of brightly hued textured panels add to the viewer’s vivid and uncanny experience as they navigate real, pictorial, and virtual space.

Peter Halley emerged as a central figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement in the 1980s. At a time when painting was declared dead, Halley revitalized abstract painting by creating compositions based on socially constructed and controlling shapes of “prisons” and “cells,” connected by “conduits.” His use of synthetic, anti-naturalistic fluorescent and metallic paints, along with the commercial paint additive Roll-a-Tex to add texture to the surface of his paintings, firmly roots his work in the technological age. In the mid-1990s, Halley pioneered wall-sized digital prints in his site-specific installations.

Halley served as professor and director of the MFA painting program at the Yale School of Art from 2002 to 2011. From 1996 to 2005, Halley published INDEX Magazine, which featured interviews with figures working in a variety of creative fields. In 2023, the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg, presented a survey of Peter Halley’s paintings from the 1980s.

This exhibition is curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Director and Chief Curator of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.