RHINEBECK, NY.- ‘T’ Space presents a new installation of wall painting by Peter Halley with sculpture by Steph Gonzalez-Turner. This exhibition will be on view from June 2 - July 28, 2024 at the ‘T’ Space Gallery: 125 1/2 Round Lake Road, Rhinebeck, NY 12572.
In the electric landscape of 1980s New York City, Peter Halley liberated the square from its prior minimalist stage and set it on fire for a new generation. Using geometry to express the physical and psychological aspects of contemporary urban space in the burgeoning digital age, his dynamic and radically colored paintings introduced a bold new abstraction. Since 1995, Halley has been world-renowned for producing multimedia, site-specific installations in which he pioneered the use of wall-sized digital prints in conjunction with other elements. Most recently, his architectural installations have been exhibited at the Museo Nivola, Orani, Sardinia (2021); Greene Naftali, New York (2019); The Academy of Fine Arts Gallery, Venice (2019); and Lever House, New York (2018).
For this exhibition, Peter Halley responds to ‘T’ Space’s unique use of symmetry and asymmetry. Inspired by Walter Gropius, Halley’s intervention will use planes of painted color to further articulate the existing architecture, with particular attention to exploring the composition of its apertures.
Halley’s installations have frequently served as opportunities to collaborate with other artists, designers, and architects including Lauren Clay, Matali Crasset, and Alessandro Mendini. For this installation at ‘T’ Space, he is collaborating with the prolific emerging sculptor, Steph Gonzalez-Turner, to generate a stimulating dialog between three arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture. Halley and Gonzalez-Turner’s rich artistic relationship and collaboration blossomed as they worked together in Halley’s studio.
Gonzalez-Turner’s artistic practice focuses on architectural intervention. Since 2023, she has created freestanding sculptures using dyed and painted plywood parquetry, and this will be her first time exhibiting this pivotal new body of work. At ‘T’ Space, Gonzalez-Turner will share these vertical, plywood poles, whose anthropomorphic presence resonates with Giacometti’s thin, vertical figures of the 1950s.
Gonzalez-Turner’s sculptures collapse temporary elements of the built environment—improvisational structures of street level infrastructure and scaffolding, cast cloth remnants and debris—with the shapes of high-rise architecture and setbacks. They behave like models, beams, floors and textiles, existing in an architectural imaginary or hypnagogic state. Made with tactile, low-relief parquetry and assembled into faceted shapes, the sculptures are both excerpts and composites of fictitious space.
Peter Halley (b. 1953) lives and works in New York. Halley came to artistic prominence as a central figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s. His paintings redeploy the language of geometric abstraction to explore the organization of social space in the digital era. His work has been the subject of numerous major museum exhibitions, most recently, a show at the Musée d'art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2023), and his work is held in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Halley is recognized for his critical writings linking post-structuralist theory to contemporary art. His Selected Essays, 1981 – 2001, was published by Edgewise Press in 2013. From 1996 to 2005, Halley published INDEX magazine, which focused on in-depth interviews with creative people in a variety of fields. Halley also served as the Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale University School of Art from 2002 to 2011.
Steph Gonzalez-Turner (b. 1984) lives and works in New York. Gonzalez-Turner earned a MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2017 and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2022, her work was exhibited at Pace, New York, in the group exhibition Stuff, curated by Arlene Shechet, and at ArtLot, Brooklyn, as part of Sculpture Garden II. In 2018, Gonzalez-Turner's work was the subject of a one-person exhibition, Architrave, at Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles, organized by Kibum Kim. Her work has garnered several awards and artist residencies, including Yale University's Helen Watson Winternitz Painting Prize and Blended Reality: Applied Research Project, in partnership with Hewlett-Packard.
