Perpetual Motion

by Peter Halley

Joop Sanders (born 1921) personifies the ideal of an artist’s artist. From his earliest years, he was a consummate virtuoso, with an unerring eye for both composition and the possibilities of oil paint. He led a life full of friends and his love for his family. He was bold, following his own instincts, moving back and forth between Holland and the United States as necessity demanded. He never fit into any preconceived notion of how an artist’s work should develop and never bowed to commercialism. He brought to the artworld of his time a deep love of culture and literature and the sophistication of a truly transatlantic outlook…

 Excerpt from exhibition catalogue, Joop Sanders: The Last Abstract Expressionist, 2025

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Peter Halley is an artist living in New York City. He came to prominence as a central figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s. Halley is also known for his essays on art and culture, written in the 1980s and 1990s, in which he explores themes from French critical theory and the impact of burgeoning digital technology. He was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association in 2001. From 1996 to 2005, Halley published INDEX Magazine. He served as professor and director of the MFA painting program at the Yale School of Art from 2002 to 2011. In 2023, the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg, presented a survey of Peter Halley’s paintings from the 1980s. Halley had a survey of his paintings in Spanish collections at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in 2024.