Peter Halley

Mixed Grid Painting / Wallpaper, 2003

Painterly abstraction, having established itself during the first three decades of the 20th century, moved into focus again in America in the 1980s. Artists like Peter Halley now occupied themselves with the more recent history of art from a historical. Halley’s re-evaluation of Abstraction is associated, in particular, with observations of the form of the town which he described as »… geometric machine in which geometry was the most efficient means of moving people and things« (P.H.: Geometry and the Social, 1991). In Halley’s eyes, the severe order consequently perceived as dominant is associated with the loss of the sovereign human being who finds himself locked in rooms which control it. The human being is therefore no longer able to serve as a motif in art. In 2003 Halley was commissioned to create a wall concept for the foyer of the Mercedes-Benz Bank Stuttgart. Image and wallpaper are characterized by architectural gradations and a specific ‘european’ color palette, based on primary colors, connected to Bauhaus, De Stijl and some buildings of the Stuttgart Weißenhofsiedlung, build around 1930.