Peter Halley

The Halleys are also related to Samuel Shipman (1884–1937), a well-known and colorful writer of Broadway comedies in the 1920s.

Other notable family members include Rudolph's first cousin Carl Solomon (1928–1993), to whom Allen Ginsberg dedicated his epic poem "Howl (for Carl Solomon)" in 1955.

Halley's great aunt and uncle, Rose and A.A. Wyn, published Ace Comics from 1940 to 1956 and Ace Books from 1952 to 1973.

In 1951, Rudolph "became an instant celebrity," as Halley has said, while serving as chief prosecutor for the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, also known as the Kefauver Committee (after Senator Estes Kefauver).

"This series of hearings with various colorful mobsters was broadcast on television all over the country," Halley notes.

Rudolph was also assistant counsel to the wartime Truman Committee, investigating fraud and waste in defense contracting.

He served as president of the New York City Council from 1951 to 1953, and ran for New York City Mayor in 1953.

He died soon after at the age of forty-three, when Halley was three years old.

Peter Halley (born 1953 ) is an American artist and a central figure in the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s.

Ace Books was an American publisher of science fiction that published William Burroughs's first novel, Junkie, in 1953, as well as the first novels by several prominent science-fiction writers including Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

A precocious child, Peter started first grade at Manhattan's Hunter College Elementary School at the age of 6.

He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a prep school known for its art museum and, at the time, innovative art program.

While at Andover, Halley took an interest in various forms of media and became the programming director for the school's low-wattage radio station.

It was also during this time that he began painting, making his first works in his great uncle Aaron's art studio.

He received college acceptances with full scholarships from Brown, Harvard, and Yale, but chose to study at Yale because of their renowned art program.

But, after his sophomore year, Halley was denied entry into the art major and decided to move to New Orleans, where he lived for one year.

He returned to Yale the following year to study art history, and wrote his senior thesis on Henri Matisse before graduating in 1975.

After graduation, Halley returned to New Orleans and, in 1976, enrolled in the University of New Orleans MFA program.

He received his MFA in 1978 and lived in New Orleans until 1980 (also traveling to Mexico, Central America, Europe, and North Africa during this time).

Halley came to prominence as an artist in the mid-1980s, as part of the generation of Neo-Conceptualist artists that first exhibited in New York's East Village, including Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sarah Charlesworth, Annette Lemieux, Steven Parrino, Phillip Taaffe, and Gretchen Bender.

Halley's paintings explore both the physical and psychological structures of social space; he connects the hermetic language of geometric abstraction—influenced by artists such as Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly—to the actualities of urban space and the digital landscape.

Halley is also known for his critical writings, which, beginning in the 1980s, linked the ideas of French Post-Structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard to the digital revolution and the visual arts.

In 1980, Halley returned to New York City and moved into a loft on East 7th Street in the East Village, Manhattan; there, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne was his upstairs neighbor.

New York City had a lasting influence on Halley's distinct painting style.

He became enamored with the city's intensity, scale, and three-dimensional urban grid—the "geometricization of space that pervaded the 20th century."

Likewise interested in abstract painting, Halley "set out to connect the language of geometric abstraction to the actual space that he saw all around him, transforming the square—borrowed from Malevich, Albers, and others—into architectural icons he called 'prisons' and 'cells,' and connecting them by straight lines called 'conduits.'"

These particular geometric icons, which he developed in the early 1980s in the midst of a global technology boom, became the basis of Halley's painting for the decades to come.

Halley derived his language not just from the urban grid but from the gridded networks permeating all facets of the contemporary "media-controlled, post-industrial world."

With this background, the "cells" could be seen as "images of confinement and as cellular units in the scientific sense," according to Calvin Tomkins.

The "conduits"—the lines connect various "cells" and other geometric patterns in a given work—represent the supports of "underlying informational and structural components of contemporary society," Amy Brandt writes.

"Halley wished to incite public awareness of the confining, underlying structures of industrialized society and commodity capitalism."

In addition to urban structures such as modernist buildings and subways, Halley drew influence from the pop themes and social issues associated with new wave music.

He took the modernist grid of previous abstract painting—namely, according to Brandt, the work of Frank Stella—and amplified its colors and impact in accordance with the postmodern times.

In the 1990s, he expanded his practice to include installations based around the technology of large-scale digital prints.

From 1996 to 2005, Halley published Index Magazine, which featured in-depth interviews with emergent and established figures in fashion, music, film, and other creative fields.

Known for his Day-Glo geometric paintings, Halley is also a writer, the former publisher of index Magazine, and a teacher; he served as director of graduate studies in painting and printmaking at the Yale University School of Art from 2002 to 2011.

Halley lives and works in New York City.

Having also taught art in several graduate programs, Halley became the director of graduate studies in painting and printmaking at the Yale University School of Art, serving from 2002 to 2011.

Halley was born and raised in New York City.

He is the son of Janice Halley, a registered nurse of Polish ancestry, and Rudolph Halley, an attorney and politician of German-Austrian Jewish descent.