Peter Halley + Alessandro Mendini
Mary Boone Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue, New York, USA
on view now through 29 june 2013
New York-based artist Peter Halley and Milan-based architect and designer Alessandro Mendini have, for the first time, collaborated in the United States. Halley’s high-keyed minimalist paintings meet Mendini’s dynamically colored wall murals in a series of nine new works. The artist revisits his long-held conceptual trope of cell and prison imagery, now playfully mediated with the architect’s bright geometric wall paper hues.
The paintings jut out or hover freely above their solid backgrounds, serving to spatialize the three meter wide printed modules repeated throughout the gallery. Halley, who has long been interested in the interaction between his paintings and architecture, invited Mendini to design the wall mural to create an intense interaction between his painting and the architectural setting created by Mendini’s intervention.
To create this site-specific work, the artist and designer corresponded through an exchange of designs and samples, which provoked a conversation about their mutual influences, creative practices, and the space of the gallery.
All images courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery
