Peter Halley in Spain

As part of its programme of shows devoted to the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is organising a monographic exhibition of the work of a contemporary classic: painter Peter Halley. This retrospective, Halley’s first since his previous one at the Museo Reina Sofía in 1992, covers the artist’s entire career, from 1985 to 2024. The selection of twenty paintings, all belonging to Spanish collections – both private and public – has been made by Halley himself, who has also designed the installation plan. 

Peter Halley’s appearance on the art scene at the beginning of the 1980s signalled a departure from the tradition of 20th-century abstract-geometric art – dominated until then by idealist and formalist concepts – towards new social concerns. In contrast with the pioneers of abstraction, for whom geometrical compositions had embodied an ideal rationality endowed with utopian value, Halley’s painting, and his critical and theoretical essays, reinterpret geometry as a means of social confinement and control that is filled with dystopian overtones. The square, an object of quasi-religious worship from Malevich to Josef Albers, is transformed with critical humour into the painter’s icons of prisons, cells and conduits. In his figures, reminiscent of microchips and flow charts, Peter Halley anticipates our digital-age society, simultaneously characterised by systematic isolation and total interconnectedness. His palette of fluorescent Day-Glo colours, evoking the flow of energy of electronic screens, has distinguished Halley as one of the boldest and most experimental chromatists of our time. 

Peter Halley, who began his career as a radical independent, has always worked without the support of any single mega-gallery, collaborating in each country with a series of small gallerists with whom he has developed long-standing relationships of trust. Our exhibition highlights the exceptional reception his work has enjoyed in Spain for almost forty years.

Following its showing in Madrid the exhibition will be seen at the Casal Solleric de Palma de Mallorca from 22 March to 25 May 2025.