Weak Force, 2016

Basel 2016
Weak Force

Galerie Thomas

Painting
4 multi-paneled paintings, acrylic and fluorescent acrylic on canvas, archival inkjet print on vinyl
1800.0 x 400.0 (cm)
708.7 x 157.5 (inch)
First recognized in the mid-1980s for his diagrammatic ‘cells’ and ‘prisons’ rendered in fluorescent color, Peter Halley has created site-specific installations that integrate his paintings with digitally produced wall prints since the mid-1990s. From 1996 to 2005, Halley published index magazine, which featured interviews with a myriad of creative people. His art criticism was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association in 2001. From 2002 to 2011, he served as Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at Yale. Halley’s work was recently included in the inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in solo exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. For Unlimited, Halley has installed large new paintings composed of bricklike blocks of intense color on wallpaper printed with schematic images of explosions. Reversing conventional expectations of figure and ground (or picture and wall), Halley wryly links the sundered histories of geometric abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop, intimating the destruction that underlies the solidity of what we construct.