Hand-Painted: Watercolors and Drawings is the first exhibition to present intimate, hand-painted works by Peter Halley, which stand in compelling contrast to the artist’s meticulously executed paintings for which the Neo-Conceptualist American painter is globally known.
These hand-painted works reveal the unique quality of the artist’s hand through his nuanced brushwork, giving insight into the artist’s approach to his creative process. The genesis of his paintings in these hand-painted works surprisingly reveals Halley’s reliance on spontaneity and improvisation.
Halley’s new hand-painted watercolors revisit his cartoon-influenced “Exploding Cell” imagery, a theme to which Halley has repeatedly returned since the 1990s in both prints and large-scale installations.
The drawings serve as scaled color studies for his iconic large-scale paintings — a working method that Halley has used since the 1980s. The exhibition includes four examples from the early 1990s on graph paper, before the artist began composing his paintings on the computer (as is his practice today). In contrast to these early works, the show includes 9 recent drawings executed from the 2021 to the present.
