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The Nivola Museum is proud to announce the Peter Halley ANTESTERIA exhibition .

Peter Halley, a key figure of American Neo-conceptualism of the 1980s, is known for his geometric painting that alludes to the social spaces of late capitalism and their dimension of confinement, isolation and confinement. The shapes of the “cell” and the “duct”, adopted in the eighties and still at the base of his work, refer to the rigid and angular structures of office skyscrapers, but also to computer microchips, electrical circuits, “rooms” virtual and the infinite connections of the web. His vision of the contemporary world, influenced by thinkers such as Foucault and Baudrillard, is steeped in pessimism, but is expressed in an electrifying, vitalistic language, full of overwhelming energy.

Starting in the 1990s, Halley began to add to the canvases a series of interventions on the architectural space made by means of wallpaper and digital prints and sometimes developed in collaboration with other artists. The project created for the Nivola Museum also focuses on this aspect of his work, where Halley will completely transform the interior of the building that houses the temporary exhibitions. The work is in full harmony with the orientation of the museum: dedicated to Costantino Nivola, one of the protagonists of the movement for the “synthesis of the arts” of the mid-twentieth century, the Nivola Museum looks with particular attention to the relationships between art, architecture and design , as evidenced by the exhibitions dedicated in the past to the encroachments in art by masters of Italian design such as Andrea Branzi,

The installation format took on greater importance for Halley starting in 2018, with the project for the Lever House in New York and with the two editions of HETEROTOPIA realized in 2019 at the Magazzini del Sale as part of the Venice Biennale and at the gallery. Greene Naftali in New York. In these projects, the installation created labyrinthine, disturbing and vaguely sacred spaces, in which the visitor wandered restless and disoriented.

In Orani, on the other hand, in the old village washhouse used by the museum for temporary exhibitions – a clear and linear building similar in shape and proportions to a church – the tone is joyful and lively, the space euphoric.

Entering from the terrace, a light-flooded environment overlooking the museum park, the visitor will be struck by the visual shock produced not only by Halley’s favorite fluorescent hues, but also by the exuberant and dynamic character of the images. Enclosed in a scheme that suggests the cycles of frescoes of the fourteenth century, but which all of a sudden rises in a series of colored waves, these combine the typical repertoire of the artist’s painting (cells, ducts, explosions) with references to art of the past, from the Renaissance to Warhol, passing through Matisse and touching the graffiti of the caves.

The Greek title of the installation, ANTESTERIA, is a reference to the spring festival of flowers in honor of Dionysus, during which, with the god present, tragedies and comedies were performed. Loaded with associations of life and death, joy and suffering, this ancient celebration of spring rings today as a wish for a possible rebirth after the pandemic.

“In the heart of Sardinia – says Antonella Camarda – Halley has created something similar to one of her Scrovegni chapel (or, if you prefer, the chapel of Matisse in Vence). The effect is that of an exciting immersion in the Dionysian climate of a Mediterranean dreamed through the filter of twentieth-century Modernism and bathed in artificial and psychedelic light. “

“The installation- states Giuliana Altea – enhances the contrasts of which Halley’s painting is made, at the same time conceptual and decorative, critically reflective and spectacular, intensely contemporary and nourished by the dialogue with the history of art: it combines opposite polarities, not so much to seek between them a synthesis or attempt to reconcile them, but rather to put them in tension and trigger short circuits of the imagination. “