VENICE.- Artist Peter Halley has created “Judgment Day,” a site-specific installation for Personal Structures, an official, collateral exhibition of the 54th Venice Biennale. Curated by Karlyn De Jong and Sarah Gold, the exhibition presents 28 installations and it is part of an international art project initiated in 2002 focusing on artists whose work is concerned with the issues of time, space and existence. Personal Structures is on view at Palazzo Bembo, the birthplace of Venetian scholar, poet and literary theorist Pietro Bembo, until November 27, 2011.
For Halley, visual art most directly addresses the issue of space. Time and existence are too elusive. Known for his luminous day-glo paintings, Halley has created an installation of inkjet digital prints using muted colors with strong Venetian cultural and historical references. The imagery is generated by mirroring, reflecting and rotating the same motif in a repeated pattern, referencing the marble surfaces found in the Basilica of San Marco and other Venetian churches, where the marble patterns represent a blend of Christian numerology and Islamic mathematics.
Peter Halley received his BA from Yale University and his MFA from the University of New Orleans. For over twenty-five years his geometric paintings have been engaged in a play of relationships between what Halley calls “prisons” and “cells” – icons that reflect the increasing geometricization of social space in the world in which we live.
Halley has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others.
His work has been exhibited in galleries in Chicago, London, Madrid, Moscow, New York, Paris, Rome, Seoul and Tokyo.
Since the mid-90s he has produced large-scale installations for public spaces. In 2005, he created a multi-paneled 17 x 40 feet painting for the Terminal D at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport, Texas. Three years later, he completed a permanent installation of digital prints on five floors for the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Halley has written on art and culture throughout his career. In 2001, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association in the United States for his critical writing.
Halley has taught at Columbia University, UCLA, and the School of Visual Arts. From 2002 to 2011 he was the Director of Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art.
From 1996-2006, Halley published index magazine featuring in-depth interviews with people in diverse creative fields. Interviewees included such figures as Kate Winslet, Bjork, Juergen Teller, Brian Eno, Tom Ford and Scarlett Johansson.
Upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Galerie Thomas in Munich, Germany (Sept., 2011) and Galerie Xippas in Geneva, Switzerland (Nov. 2011).
His work will also be included in the following group exhibitions: "Surreal versus Surrealism in Contemporary Art" at IVAM, Valencia (Sept. – Dec. 11, 2011)“This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980” at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, (Feb. – May, 2012). Traveling to the Walker Art Center (June – September, 2012), the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston (October 2012 – January, 2013).
