Mudam has brought together thirty paintings by New York artist Peter Halley, retracing the first ten years of the career of the minimalist and visionary painter, crossed by important social questions.
By proposing to cross the 1980s in the company of Peter Halley and his works, Mudam offers the public a new monographic exhibition with a rare and exceptional character of which only it has the secret. We are witnessing the birth of a work here, in thirty paintings and ten years of work.
“Make an erudite and serious exhibition”, such was the will of the curator, Michelle Cotton. This is because Peter Halley, a figure of the New York scene and of the “Neo-Geo” movement (with Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton and Jeff Koons), claims as much of abstract and minimalist art as of the theater of the nonsense – he cites Beckett and Ionesco as influences. Language then occupies a central place in his work, especially since here, we are committed to following the development of “his” language.
It all started with the artist’s return in 1980 to New York, a city that saw him grow up. “It made a strong impression on me,” recalls the artist, now 69 years old. The first months were difficult, “sinister”, even, with the death of his grandmother and a work that will result from it, The Grave. “Then the tomb becomes a prison”, continues Peter Halley, emphasizing the “cold humour” which inhabits his work.
The square, central figure
The square, a form borrowed from Malevich, is reinterpreted and will remain central to Peter Halley’s work for decades to come. “In New York, I felt isolated; my way of expressing it was to add bars to this square, and give it a new meaning.”
With his interest in basic geometric forms, Peter Halley proceeds to “approach geometry through architecture, urban planning, the environment in which we live and, more empirically, what there is to to question within that”, analyzes Michelle Cotton.
In addition to his pictorial work, Peter Halley has also largely theorized his artistic work and the reflections that have crossed it in essays, influenced by the postmodern philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault.
“A geometrized, rationalized, quantified world”
In 1984, in The Crisis of Geometry, Halley asks: “For what purpose was the geometric form introduced into our culture?”. He answers it in an abstract way in his paintings, then in full in another essay, Geometry and the Social (1990): “I wanted to draw attention to this geometrized, rationalized, quantified world. (Geometry is) the language of business and flowcharts; it is the language of town planning and communications.”
Going through the exhibition, ordered chronologically and completed by important wall indications, Peter Halley insists that by “(bringing) into a radical division of art”, he wanted to “(get) involved in a form of experience, aiming to create a large amount of work with very limited means”.
But its squares and its prisons very accurately tell of the growing isolation of humans and their alienation; when, in the mid-1980s, he began to add more cables and connections to it, Halley delivered a conscious discourse on the role of technology within the private sphere, and the paradox, therefore, of a society ever more isolated and interconnected. Hence the fact that, in the second half of the decade, his works no longer gave “the impression of a human presence” at all.
A feeling of discomfort
Among the most striking works in the exhibition, Ideal City (1984) has the particularity of offering a view from above; it’s like looking at the dial of a telephone, while the work is rather the plan for an urban planning project linked to connectivity between the inhabitants, a rather distressing prospect.
Two Cells with Circulating Conduit (1986) transmits the same feeling of discomfort, powerless as one is in front of this closed circuit, while Prison (1989) still arouses a certain discomfort, this time by the profusion of cables emerging from all sides, of different sizes and colors.
Michelle Cotton invites us to imagine this last painting “as the first ever representation of artificial intelligence”. We are here in the presence of a visionary artist.
Until October 15.
Mudam – Luxembourg.