Red Cell with Conduit
Peter Halley. Red Cell with Conduit. 1982. Acrylic, Day-Glo acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 64 x 42" (162.6 x 106.7 cm). Gift of the artist. © 2013 Peter Halley
Peter Halley. Red Cell with Conduit. 1982. Acrylic, Day-Glo acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 64 x 42" (162.6 x 106.7 cm). Gift of the artist. © 2013 Peter Halley
Red Cell with Conduit is a luminous color field divided in two: the upper three-quarters represent what Halley describes as an interior cell, and the lower quarter contains a conduit—a diagrammatic scheme that suggests the flow of information or electricity or the transportation of materials. With this hybrid of high-modernist abstraction and cryptic map, Halley has created a rigorously simple iconography in order, as he has said, to "reinterpret geometric abstraction as a representation of the industrial and post-industrial landscape."