Peter Halley "Drawings: Four Decades"
Sandra Gering Gallery
This event has ended.
This exhibition presents a survey of drawings and studies by Peter Halley. Spanning the 1970s to the present, it includes a wide array of media through which the artist has developed his practice: paint studies on paper, photomechanical Kodalith prints, digital animation video, wall-size vinyl flowcharts, as well as ink on paper. This is the first time that most of these works will be exhibited.
Following the trajectory of Halley's work since the 1970s, the exhibition includes a series of small gouache drawings from 1978, done during Halley's years as a graduate student at the University of New Orleans. Executed before his exposure to post-modern theory, these works exuberantly cull influences from Native American, Islamic, and African art to form highly codified landscape imagery.
Also in the exhibition is a variety of works from the early 1980s in which Halley maps his developing concern with post-industrial space -- first in a series of simple mechanical pen drawings on graph paper, then in his "Kodaliths." In these, Halley’s drawings are printed on mylar as photographic negatives, thus yielding an ethereal clear line on a film-like black background. As Halley’s work with Kodaliths progresses through the mid-80s, he focuses less on articulating his new world of prisons, cells, and, conduits, and more on the re-presentation of simple words and phrases taken from the realm of packaging and highway signage in works like "Digitally Mastered" and "Maintain Speed".
Never previously shown is a digital animation, "Exploding Cell," 1983, which was laboriously produced at a professional production house just before the era of personal computers. Also included are two "Flowcharts" from the 1990s, a decade in which Halley was exploring parallels between the space of flowcharts as a means of organizing information and the space of his own paintings.
Finally, the exhibition includes over twenty of the paint-on-paper studies that Halley uses to lay out his large meticulously rendered geometric paintings. Small in scale and executed with painterly directness, they are an intimate contrast to the artist's full-scale works.
[Image: Peter Halley "Prisons, Apartment Building" (1981) Pen on graph paper, 17 x 22 in.]
Media
Schedule
from March 05, 2011 to April 23, 2011