Peter Halley

Peter Halley’s latest show—his first with Greene Naftali—was spectacular, though severely and queasily so. Setting the tone for severity, the artist commandeered the Brutalist ambience of the gray, cinderblock-enclosed courtyard adjacent to the gallery entrance with a prominently placed, bodily scaled, faux-concrete-and-asphalt work from 1994, Cell with Conduit, thrust several inches out from the wall by a hefty steel armature. A distilled (one-cell, one-conduit), quintessential Halley composition that signaled, as always, a core contemporary paradox—the isolating effect of mediated connection—the work looked like a company logo emblazoning the facade of a sci-fi industrial complex. On the back wall just to the right, a large, reflective, metallic print bearing a one-to-one reproduction of the surface to which it was adhered, amplified the gathering sense of

— Jeff Gibson