Big and bold: Flo Gris showcases Peter Halley's monumental paintings

February 22, 2015 11:00 pm • Last Updated: February 22, 2015 5:27 pm

By Kristina Dorsey
Features Editor

"Accretion” (2014) by Peter Halley makes its public debut at the Florence Griswold Museum.

The Florence Griswold Museum is, of course, famously linked with American Impressionism, but its scope is more expansive than that.

One thing that the museum has done in recent years is produce periodic exhibitions focusing on contemporary artists who have lived and worked in Connecticut. The idea is to broaden people's perception of the state's artistic heritage in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The latest such exhibition is "Peter Halley: Big Paintings." Halley is an apt choice - he is "a monumental figure in the story of American contemporary art," says Ben Colman, the Florence Griswold Museum assistant curator who organized the exhibit.

And he has a distinct connection to Connecticut. Even though he is recognized as an iconic New York artist, Halley divides his time between there and a home in Guilford. The artist, who was born in 1953, was an undergraduate at Yale University and later, from 1999 to 2011, was a professor and director for the Yale School of Art's graduate painting program.

Halley happens to be an extremely prolific artist, so, Colman says, it was challenging to pick just a small group of his works for an exhibit. The decision: to focus on nine of his very large paintings. (Of the pieces in the Flo Gris galleries, the longest painting runs 18 feet and the tallest rises 10 feet.)

The works are drawn from major public and private collections, including from the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

These paintings are where the artist gives his most important ideas their most concrete form, according to Colman. Halley uses iconography and symbols to look more closely at the way we live our daily lives. They are metaphorical meditations on enclosures and barriers between individuals.

Halley burst onto the art scene in 1980s New York City, Colman says, "with a radical twist on American abstraction in that he was playing with large squares and rectangles and bands of colors, things that, on their surface, looked like art made in decades past - like the Color-Field paintings and the minimalist paintings of the '60s and '70s - but with the added content that he was using these as part of a representational language."

That language features solid squares representing cells; squares with banded windows representing prisons; and bars of colors representing conduits, which serve as avenues of connectivity between the prisons and cells

The works in "Peter Halley: Big Paintings" are divided into three galleries and different time frames. The first room is devoted to the 1980s. That was when Halley developed his language, and the paintings selected from that era are spare and direct in their focus.

"They're highlighting individual prisons or small groupings of cells, with a sense of disconnection and loneliness that reflects the artist's own experience as a young painter who had just moved back to New York and found the city to be somewhat impersonal and overwhelming," Colman says.

The paintings from that period tend to have a sedate palette but with small segments of Day-Glo colors and rough textures. (The textures are created by Roll-A-Tex, a paint additive sold at hardware stores and used to make popcorn ceilings.)

The second room harbors works from the 1990s and early 2000s and, to a large extent, reflect Halley's changing situation.

"The paintings seem so different," Colman says. "They're using the same visual language of prisons, cells and conduits, but all of a sudden, he's not a young painter new to the city."

Instead, he's a vital member of a flourishing arts community in New York - and he has a young family.

"He's really much more connected to the surrounding community in lots of new and, as illustrated in the paintings, very exciting and productive ways," Colman says.

The paintings tend to link his cells and prisons through conduits, symbolizing interconnection.

"Instead of representing the social through abstraction, during this period Halley argued that the social landscape itself relies fundamentally on abstraction of meaning in its environments, visual languages, and ordering principles," according to the exhibition text.

The colors he uses in this period become more vibrant. He plays with bold contrasts. And he's not just employing fluorescent and Day-Glo paints any more but also metallic and pearlescent ones.

And the final, third room boasts works made in the 2000s and up to the present, The mixed-grid paintings that Halley started doing in the last 12 to 15 years are, on the surface, very modern in their orientation, Colman notes. The compositions of squares and rectangles, side by side, might remind viewers of, say, Mondrian. But Halley's pieces, Colman says, are "using the same iconographic significance that he developed in the '80s. They're using them to reflect a very different condition than he observed in the '80s. His paintings have been made to explore a sense of enclosure and encapsulation that he sees as very contemporary."

The artist sees that sense of enclosure and encapsulation, in fact, as part of the modern technological landscape. In his 1980s paintings, Halley would have connected the individual prisons and cells to elements around them via conduits. In the more current works, Colman says, those prisons and cells "are kind of hermetically sealed off. He sees this as an outgrowth of changes in technology, where now everyone has at least two small computers in their pockets ... that become the reference point for engaging with the world around them."

Featured is "Accretion," a 2014 creation that is making its public debut. This is the first of Halley's mixed grids that use just his cell icon, not his prison icon. While the piece recalls the forms and compositions of artists like Mondrian, the exhibition wall text notes, "By referencing that historic approach to abstraction with industrial pigments and textures associated with commercial environments, Halley questions the ideological purity that artists like Mondrian sought through their geometric art."

Peter Halley's “Cartoon Network” (1997) “shows amultifaceted social landscape of individual cells closely connected to a surrounding environment,” according to the Flo Gris exhibit.

In early works like “Two Cells with Conduit” (1987), Peter Halley reacted against Minimalist art. He calls his squares “cells” and bands of color “conduits.” “The cells suggest spaces for individuals isolated from one another by large barriers, while the conduit show connections to the wider world,” the exhibit states.