Peter Halley - en España

As part of its exhibition program dedicated to the collection of Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, together with the Casal Solleric of Palma City Council, is organizing a monographic exhibition dedicated to a contemporary classic, the painter Peter Halley. This is the first Halley retrospective since the Museo Reina Sofía dedicated it to him in 1992 and covers the artist's entire career, from 1985 to 2024. The Casal Solleric selected twenty pieces for the exhibition, all from Spanish collections, both private and public, by the artist himself, who also designed the installation plan. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that includes texts by Enrique Juncosa, Guillermo Solana, and Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta.

Peter Halley's emergence around 1980 rectified the tradition of 20th-century abstract-geometric art, which until then had been dominated by idealist and formalist conceptions, placing it in a social context. For the pioneers of abstraction, geometry embodied an ideal rationality endowed with utopian value; in both his painting and his critical and theoretical essays, Halley reinterpreted geometry as a means of confinement and social control, with dystopian features. The square, which had been the object of a quasi-religious cult from Malevich to Josef Albers, was humorously transformed into his icons of prisons, cells, and conduits. And in his compositions reminiscent of integrated circuits and flowcharts, Peter Halley anticipated the society of the digital age, marked simultaneously by systematic isolation and total interconnection. With his use of a fluorescent (Day-glo) color palette, which evokes the energy of electronic screens, Halley has distinguished himself as one of the most daring and experimental colorists of our time.

Peter Halley began as a radical independent artist and has worked to this day without the support of a mega-gallery, collaborating in each country with gallerists with whom he has a long-standing relationship of trust. Our exhibition highlights the exceptional reception his work has enjoyed in Spain for almost 40 years.

Press release

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Peter Halley

en España

Mar 22 — May 25, 2025 | Casal Solleric, Palma, Spain

The frenetic pace of our time floods our retinas, numbing them, desensitising them to the relentless stimuli that unfold around us at an unprecedented speed. In the face of this overwhelming excess of new and old images — (re)created, (re)constructed, (re)used — ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from the unfathomable to the imperceptible, reality has become abstract, and abstraction has become the new reality. In their relentless flux, images resemble everything and nothing at once: a new visuality has altered the way we look, to the point where seeing has become (not) seeing. Peter Halley is undoubtedly one of the most influential artists of our time — a creator who has attuned himself to the whirlwind of contemporary existence to show us that there is another way to create, to observe, to see. He has done so by redefining our relationship with images in a way that conditions how we interpret them; through a tactile painting that is felt with the eyes, an art that suggests and is ingested as swiftly or as lingeringly as the viewer desires — something explosive and immediate, yet also contemplative and reflective, but always alive and deeply engaging.

Halley’s work brings meaning to what Rosalind Krauss observed when she noted that categories such as sculpture and painting have been kneaded, stretched, and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, revealing how a cultural term can expand to encompass anything. In this case, the artist has conceived a new concept for that magic and scientific square — a construct that has played a pivotal role in the dynamic evolution of abstract painting throughout the twentieth century. From Kazimir Malevich and his celestial Suprematism in black and white, to Josef Albers’ chromatic and concentric variations that assert the autonomy of colour through the entire geometric lineage of contemporary art history — including influences from traditional Mexican craftsmanship — Halley has produced a form of painting that transcends abstraction. He constructs his signature chromatic cells, interconnected by channels of colour, which inescapably evoke the figurative universe of the new reality that shapes our time.

This vision of a new social geometry is established as a critical diagram, an analytical scheme in which the implicit presence of buildings, urban grids, and their inherent flows constructs the post-industrial landscape that shapes contemporary life. It is a universe that bridges reality and abstract painting, creating a space for both art and existence. In Halley’s social geometry, we encounter the luminous, artificial, and at times even anarchic colours of Day-Glo, alongside the mechanical texture of Roll-a-Tex, forming barred windows that serve as a precise metaphor for contemporary existence. These are spaces that are both isolated and hyper-connected, where the digital maelstrom, culture, and mass media are disseminated at the same rapid pace as the relentless flow of data that underpins them. They are (minimal) units of habitation, traversed by the highways of indiscriminate information — a beautiful yet unsettling metaphor for a present that longs to escape its own prison.
— Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta