Peter Halley Exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery opens September 6th.

PETER HALLEY

Prints & Editions: 25 Years

Opening reception: Friday, September 6, 5:00 – 8:30pm

The artist will be present.

Exhibition continues through December 21, 2013

Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 9:00-5:00; Saturday noon-5:00pm

No admission

Opening on September 6, 2013, Carl Solway Gallery will present a 25-year survey of the prints and editions of New York artist Peter Halley. The exhibition will feature 33 editioned works, including silkscreen, letterpress, and digital prints, editioned wall installations, and low-relief sculptural editions.  

The works on view provide an overview of Halley’s wide-ranging experimentation in both traditional and digital printmaking techniques since the 1980s.

Beginning with his early vacuum-formed relief “Prison,” produced in 1987, and concluding with his most recent low-relief edition, “Explosion," produced digitally with a CNC router by Carl Solway Gallery in 2013, this show presents the first retrospective of Halley’s prints and wall installations since his 1997 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Halley’s prints can be seen as a counterpoint to his paintings, which are based on a hermetic, restricted visual vocabulary.  In contrast, his printmaking practice has provided him with the opportunity to incorporate elements from the outside world including imagery from cartoons and found graphics such as flow charts. As opposed to the rational, rectilinear geometry of his paintings, Halley's printmaking has long focused on the image of the explosion, beginning with 1993 silkscreen print “Exploding Cell.” Halley is also a recognized innovator in the use of digital prints to produce mural-sized works.

Peter Halley has executed permanent digitally-printed mural installations for the Biblioteca Publica Jose Hierro in Usera, Spain, in 2002, and at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study at New York University in 2008.  

PETER HALLEY

Since the mid 1980s, Peter Halley has been recognized for his geometric paintings that reinterpret abstract art through the diagramming of contemporary social space.

Halley came to prominence through his early exhibitions at International with Monument in New York’s East Village in 1985 and 1986. Halley has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1991), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1992), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1992), the Des Moines Art Center (1992), the Dallas Museum of Art (1995), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (1998), the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1998), and the Butler Institute of American Art (1999).

Since the mid-1990s, Halley has produced site-specific installations for exhibitions and as permanent public works. These projects have been realized at the State University of New York, Buffalo (1998), the city library in Usera, Spain (2002), the Banco Suisso d’Italia Art Collection, Turin (2003), and the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in Texas (2005). In 2008, he completed a large permanent installation for the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Peter Halley is also a well respected teacher, publisher, and writer.  From 2002-2011, he was Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. From 1996 to 2005 he published index magazine, featuring in-depth interviews with creative people from all fields. His writings, addressing post-structuralism, post-modernism and the digital revolution of the 1980s have been anthologized in Selected Essays: 1981-2001, published in 2013 by Edgewise Press.  In 2001, Halley received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for excellence in art criticism from the College Art Association.

Born in New York City in 1953, Halley received his B.A. from Yale University in 1975 and his M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans in 1978.  He lived in New Orleans in the latter half of the 1970s and has lived and worked in New York City since 1980.