Peter Halley

Painting as simulation and hyperreality: Peter Halley and the digital age.

In the 1980s, Peter Halley revitalised painting by relying on sociology and science fiction. He employed fluorescent colours and Roll-A-Tex to deconstruct early and mid-twentieth-century transcendent geometric abstraction into abstract cells and prisons and by adding conduits to imaginatively access outside forces.

Peter Halley has met many challenges posed by the Information Age and French poststructuralism by situating his painting on the divide separating analogue and digital worlds. Robert Hobbs’s monograph analyses Halley’s geometric and highly keyed art in terms of opportunities provided by the Internet, aesthetic possibilities afforded by Photoshop, timely relevance advanced by Michel Foucault’s and Jean Baudrillard’s sociological theories, and conundrums presented by both science fiction and physics.