| Summary: | Karma presents 'Peter Halley, Boats Crosses Trees Figures', a survey of the artist's early works on paper produced in 1977 and 1978, during his years living in New Orleans. In these gouaches and cut-paper collages, color-saturated grids of squares and rectangles are assembled into a lexicon of symbolic representations of landscapes, boats, teepees, crosses, and the human figure. The works draw from an exuberant range of sources including Navajo and Hopi traditions, Islamic art and architecture, West African textiles, the paper cut-outs of Henri Matisse, and even David Hockney's waggish LA paintings of the 1960s. Embracing an ebullient anthropological romanticism, these works of the late '70s stand in stark contrast to the pessimism soon to appear in Halley's austere works of the 1980s, with their emphasis on the here-and-now of a society dominated by capitalism and digital technology.
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