As part of its exhibition programme based on the collection of Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting a monographic exhibition dedicated to a contemporary classic, the painter Peter Halley (New York, 1953). This is the first Halley retrospective in Spain since the one organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 1992 and covers the artist’s entire career, from 1985 to 2024. The selection of twenty paintings, belonging to Spanish collections, both private and public, was made by the artist himself, who also designed the installation plan. The exhibition has also been organised in collaboration with Palma City Council and Casal Solleric, where it can be seen in spring 2025.
Peter Halley’s entry onto the scene around 1980 rectified the tradition of abstract-geometric art of the 20th century, which until then had been dominated by idealist and formalist conceptions, placing it in a social context. For the pioneers of abstraction, geometry embodied an ideal rationality endowed with utopian value; both in his painting and in his critical and theoretical essays, Halley reinterprets geometry as a means of confinement and social control, with dystopian features. The square, which had been the object of a quasi-religious cult from Malevich to Josef Albers, he turns it with critical humour into his icons of prisons, cells and conduits.
The World Is Not Enough, 1999. Acrylic, fluorescent, metallic and pearlescent acrylic, and Roll‐a‐Tex on canvas. Private collection.
And in his compositions reminiscent of integrated circuits and flow charts, Peter Halley anticipates the society of the digital age, marked at the same time by systematic isolation and total interconnection. Moreover, with his use of a fluorescent (Day-glo) colour palette, evoking the energy of electronic screens, Halley has distinguished himself as one of the most daring and experimental colourists of our time.
Peter Halley began as a radical independent artist and has worked to this day without the support of a mega-gallery, collaborating in each country with gallerists with whom he has a long relationship of trust.
The exhibition highlights the exceptional reception that his work has enjoyed in Spain for almost forty years, where he exhibited for the first time in 1986, participating in El arte y su doble: una perspectiva de Nueva York, a collective exhibition that showed the panorama of the New York scene at the time at the Fundación Caja de Pensiones in Madrid. Shortly afterwards, in 1992, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presented a retrospective that had previously been seen in other European museums in Bordeaux (APC Musée d’Art Contemporain), Pully/Lausanne (FAE Musée d’Art Contemporain) and later in Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum). It was then that he also began to exhibit in Spanish galleries, such as Galería Senda in Barcelona and, a few years later, with Javier López in Madrid.
Condition, 2001. Acrylic, metallic and pearlescent acrylic, and Roll‐a‐Tex on canvas. Private collection, Santiago de Compostela.
Peter Halley’s paintings are found in Spanish public collections, such as those of the Museo Reina Sofía, the Fundación “la Caixa” or the IVAM (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern), and in private collections, and he has a permanent installation in the Biblioteca Pública José Hierro de Usera, in Madrid (2002), based on Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel.
The exhibition presents twenty large-format works that span his entire career, from 1985 to 2024, and through which we can observe his evolution over time. Cárcel (1985) or Comercio de pieles (1994) present simple compositions that have a monochrome feel, close to minimalism, while Edutainment and Apagón (both 2005) or Gravedad (2006) already show more dynamism and complexity, achieved through the repetition of figures, rotated or flipped, the superposition of planes and a greater number of colours.
Later, Halley continues to delve into the ideas that were behind his first geometric works, although with brighter, lighter or less intense colours than in previous decades, or multiplying the shapes, as in Mágico a medias (2018), Clemencia (2019) or La nota alta (2020), where he presents three cells instead of just one.
