Peter Halley

Sphere (bronze and silver prisons), 1997

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 perspective – and in the case of Halley also on the basis of Post-Structuralism, especially the papers of Michel Foucault. 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. Sphere (bronze and silver prisons) is characterized by architectural gradations and spatial intersections. Therefore it belongs to a formal openness and increasing elegance in Halley’s œuvre, that can be observed since the 1990s, which formerly was determined by strict and uncolored grids.