In The Studio with Peter Halley

Peter Halley’s studio is perched on top of an old warehouse building in Chelsea. The surrounding area, once manufacturing, has bloomed with blue-chip galleries and expensive apartments in the last decade. Before that it was an area defined by its wealth of artists' studios, and the community they built in the neighbourhood. Eventually many were priced out. 

The change in this bit of Manhattan’s landscape might tell, in microcosm, some of the story of American art in its inexorable shift towards commerce.

Peter’s been installed here since the mid-90s. His studio gazing out over the Hudson River. In the centre of the studio, pride of place and incongruous among his fluorescent-coloured geometric paintings, is a reproduction of a statue of Zeus, often referred to as The Artemision Bronze, and which is immediately recognisable to anyone who's been to Athens and seen the cheap copies in tourist shops that line the base of the Acropolis. Peter’s is a full-scale reproduction, shipped back to New York from a trip 25 years ago.  

“New York was scary in the 70s, but if anything, it's too safe now. But we could afford to live in the Village or Tribeca then, and there were all these cheap, big spaces to work in, there’s very few artists under sixty living here today.”

It’s a playful touch for an artist who has playfully dissected art history throughout his career. As we sit down to talk, he stumbles across an old postcard, announcing his first exhibition in 1981, in a box on his desk. It features a self-portrait of kinds, Halley rigid in fear surrounded, he explains with a laugh, by “the great artists of the previous century. Which does turn out to have been the story of my artistic growth since.” 

In 1981 Peter had just returned to New York, where he was born and grew up, after a few years living in New Orleans. “New York was scary in the 70s,” he says, laughing again, when asked why he departed. He’s a softly spoken, mischievously young 72-years-old. “I always admired Julian Schnabel and Barbara Kruger and everyone who stayed. But I left and then missed it and came back. If anything, it's too safe now. We could afford to live in the Village or Tribeca then and there were all these cheap, big spaces to work in, there’s very few artists under sixty living here today.”  

Peter’s visual language has remained remarkably stable over the four decades since that first exhibition, the shapes, the arrangements, the underlying ideas and colours have remained pretty consistent.   

Although within that there have been many various bodies of work — he’s worked in architectural projects, installations, stained glass, he made the first digital artwork released by MoMA and has experimented widely in that medium too, often reworking older works into new digital formats — but it is his brightly coloured geometric paintings that have defined his career. Outside of his work as an artist and teacher — he led the MFA programme at Yale for many years — he’s probably equally known for Index, a magazine he founded and which helped define the style and culture of 90s New York, and which acted as a breeding ground for young creative talent.   

“My paintings are very much about permutation and mutation. As early as 1981 I took a square, added bars to it, called it a ‘prison’, and placed it in a kind of landscape. It was my critique of geometric abstraction: a way of saying geometry isn’t an ideal form but something imprisoning,” Peter says of his initial works. 

“Around the same time, I started using a textured stucco material called Roll-a-Tex, to give some areas of the paintings their raised, gritty surfaces. I started using fluorescent paint too, which was considered transgressive at the time. People thought it wasn’t appropriate for ‘serious’ painting because I was using commercial materials, but I loved how bright they were. Even then I felt we lived in a world of neon, artificial light, shopping malls — and later, LED screens. Fluorescent colour felt closer to the glow of screens than anything available from the art-supply shops.”  

The pictorial language he developed during that time has formed the basis of his work since. A translation of the geometric and abstract space of the canvas into a reflection of the modern spaces of the city. The square, a direct reference to Malevich or Mondrian, is no longer a figure of Modernist utopia, but is transmuted via those commercial materials to reflect the post-modern reality of life in the 80s: with its New Wave bands, fragmentation and consumerism.   

“People thought it wasn’tappropriate for a ‘serious’ painting to be done with commercial material, but I loved how bright fluorescent paint was. Even then I felt we lived in a world of neon, artificial light, shopping malls, LED screens. Fluorescent colour felt closer to the glow of screens than anything available from the art-supply shops.”

“I was living alone in the East Village at the time, feeling somewhat isolated, and I started thinking about how I was connected to others by telephone, by electricity, by television, all these hidden conduits governed by corporations and the state. I realised that modern life was defined by people living in isolation yet connected through networks. In retrospect, it anticipated the internet, people sitting alone, communicating by screen with no physical proximity, linked instead by an invisible web.”  

Peter turned the aesthetic orders of minimalist art into spaces of charged politics, a critique of the heroic utopian postures of the Bauhaus, and in its use of commercial material a reflection, also, perhaps, of the commercialisation of abstract art. “Those artists really were revolutionaries and I love them, but my work is a reflection on the avant-garde art of the 20th century that didn’t quite deliver on its promises.”  

Outside of that storied career in painting — in just the last two years he’s had solo exhibitions in London, San Francisco, Istanbul, Madrid, Shanghai — it’s the decade he spent publishing Index magazine that has imbued him with legendary status. 

“Some artists are inspired by nature, I’m inspired by people,” Peter says, when asked about what pushed him to launch Index. “New York in the 90s felt a bit depleted, culturally speaking, so starting a magazine that interviewed figures from fashion, film, architecture, music, art, all together, seemed exciting. The late 90s were a high point for what we called indie culture: independent film, indie music, small publishers. i-D was around, Purple was emerging. It felt right to cover people who existed across those worlds. Index was always interested in mixing worlds and celebrating that mix: high and low, rich and not-so-rich, the famous and the unknown. The only editorial guide was to feature people we genuinely admired.”  

It also acted as a crucible for a new wave of talented photographers and writers, helping to launch the careers of people like Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan McGinley, Juergen Teller, as well as importantly, mixing together people from across different art forms and culture and presenting them together. Peter describes it as “the anti-Vanity Fair,” or at least some experimental, counter-cultural version of it, but it also stands as a cultural framework widely imitated and admired today; an exhibition in Paris in September this year underscored its importance to a younger generation.   

“New York in the 90s felt a bit depleted culturally, so starting Index and bringing fashion, film, architecture, music, art, all together, seemed exciting. I wanted to create a kind of anti-Vanity Fair.”

After Index closed he taught at Yale for ten years, and is still busy painting in the studio, often reworking old ideas and forms into new works., “Some of the stained-glass-like windows are based on drawings from the early 80s; others incorporate motifs from installations in the 90s. It lets me weave the past into new forms, I’m still very inspired to make work.”  

The Artemision Bronze catches the last of the afternoon light in the studio, he points to a huge building rising up in the skyline to the West, which used to be one of the largest factories in the world, and which now houses more luxury apartments. In New York cultural scenes rise and recede with economic cycles, but Peter remains a rare constant: a painter whose ideas seeped into the fabric of the city itself. At 72, he’s still refining the visual grammar he devised in the 80s, a grammar that now reads uncannily like a map of our hyper-connected world. The rest of the art world may have moved through countless trends, but Halley has kept to his own circuitry. After four decades of work, his language hasn’t calcified. If anything, it now seems to describe the present more vividly than ever.