Peter Halley examines how the spaces we inhabit control movement and produce meaning. His paintings combine three basic visual elements—what the artist calls “prisons,” “conduits,” and “cells”—in brilliant colors. He works out each composition in a digital drawing program and then produces a small-scale study, examples of which are on view here. The work is next translated to a large-scale, textural painting on canvas. Halley’s rigid, repetitive forms suggest machinery or the harsh fluorescent lights of a prison cell.

Halley, a New York native, was struck when he saw Barnett Newman’s memorial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. Newman’s seemingly simple paintings of Zips, dividing fields of color, conjure both vast philosophical concepts and expansive space. Halley’s own work honors Newman and deconstructs his achievements. As he once put it, “I took Newman’s Zip and turned it into plumbing.”