Peter Halley, Cell Grids, Dallas Contemporary, 2021-22 (Hand Signed by Peter Halley)

Alpha 137 Gallery is honored to offer this offset lithograph of legendary American artist Peter Halley's 2021-2022 exhibition at Dallas Contemporary, which the artist hand signed in black marker. It is a part of a selection of posters published on the occasion of major exhibitions in the artist's career which we have acquired.  If you are a Peter Halley fan, snag this collectors' item now while it's still available.  

Attached is a photograph of our director Nadine Witkin at Peter Halley's studio along with a photo of Nadine with the artist.

Click HERE  for a recent New York Times Magazine feature on Peter Halley - and you'll also see the wonderful shout out he gave to Alpha 137 Gallery.

Below is more information about the exhibition, from the Dallas Contemporary website:

PETER HALLEY
CELL GRIDS

26 september 2021 — 13 march 2022

CELL GRIDS, Peter Halley’s first exhibition in Texas in more than fifteen years, presents a unique series of paintings made from 2015 to the present. CELL GRIDS showcases a surprising vein of Halley’s work, paintings in which one element of his distinctive iconography – his intensely colored rectilinear “cells” – is isolated and arranged into syncopated grids, bringing his work into dialogue with the structural grid of classic Modernism as represented in the work of Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol and others.

Since the 1980s, Peter Halley’s paintings have blurred the distinction between geometric abstraction and representation. In Halley’s paintings, monochromatic squares become “prisons” and “cells,” while straight lines become the “conduits” connecting them.

The paintings on view in CELL GRIDS at Dallas Contemporary are a focused presentation of a new direction in Halley’s work developed over the last six years in which the artist has isolated a single element of his personal iconography, the intensely colored rectilinear “cells,” arranging them into large-scale syncopated grids.

Multiple canvases are bolted together into a tightly packed jigsaw puzzle devoid of atmosphere, while the paintings’ bright, luminous color combines with their rough tactile surfaces to create a palpable tension between attraction and repulsion. 

Devoid of Halley’s usual practice of deploying his prisons, cells and conduits in a figure-ground space to create a recognizable narrative, the CELL GRIDS paintings tread a subtle line between purist Modernist abstraction and Post-Modern referentiality, creating yet another level of tension and ambiguity.

Shown together at Dallas Contemporary for the first time, this group of eighteen large-scale paintings extends Halley’s ongoing exploration of the language of painting. The exhibition offers a surprising new way of engaging with the artist’s work. 

CELL GRIDS curated by Dallas Contemporary Executive Director Peter Doroshenko and will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue.

Below is Peter Halley's official biography. What it doesn't mention is that Andy Warhol famously painted his portrait in 1986! Peter Halley is that legendary. According to Halley, he didn't realize until after Warhol's death that the polaroids Warhol took of him with his famous "big shot" camera were made into an original painting. Warhol's painting of Peter Halley was included in the recent Andy Warhol retrospective   "Andy Warhol - from A to B and Back Again" at the Whitney. 

PETER HALLEY BIOGRAPHY

Peter Halley, born 1953, New York City, is an American artist who came to prominence as a central figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s. His paintings redeploy the language of geometric abstraction to explore the organization of social space in the digital era.

Since the 1980s, Halley’s lexicon has included three elements: “prisons” and “cells,” connected by “conduits,” which are used in his paintings to explore the technologically determined space and pathways that regulate daily life. Using fluorescent color and Roll-a-Tex, a commercial paint additive that provides readymade texture, Halley embraces materials that are anti-naturalistic and commercially manufactured. 

In the mid 1990s Halley pioneered the use of wall-sized digital prints in his site-specific installations. He has executed installations at Museo Nivola, Orani, Sardinia (2021); Greene Naftali, New York (2019); Venice Biennale (2019); Lever House, New York (2018); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2016); Disjecta, Portland (2012); the Gallatin School, New York University, (2008, 2017); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); and the Dallas Museum of Art (1995). In 2005, Halley was also commissioned to create a monumental painting for Terminal D at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Texas. 

Halley served as professor and director of the MFA painting program at the Yale School of Art from 2002 to 2011. From 1996 to 2005, Halley published INDEX Magazine, which featured interviews with figures working in a variety of creative fields. Halley is also known for his essays on art and culture, written in the 1980s and 1990s, in which he explores themes from French critical theory and the impact of burgeoning digital technology. His Selected Essays, 1981 – 2001, was published by Edgewise Press, New York, in 2013.Halley’s writings have been translated into Spanish, French, and Italian.  

A catalogue raisonné, PETER HALLEY: Paintings of the 1980s, was published in 2018 by JRP Ringier. 

Halley’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Dallas Museum of Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Sammlung Marx, Berlin; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Seoul Museum of Art, among others.