Peter Halley & Tracy Thomason

The future is in home offices! The furniture cleared out, tucked away with the cats. Door off its hinges. Radiator hissing. Who wants galleries anymore? Give us a small room in a rent-stabilized Bed-Stuy apartment, a light fixture shaped like a nipple!

Teen Party opened this week with a cross-generational survey pairing painters Peter Halley (b. 1953) and Tracy Thomason (b. 1984). Both artists work within their own tightly controlled formal vocabularies. Halley has, for decades, continued to develop his iconic grids and cells--”a reminder of the apartment house, the hospital bed, the school desk”--exploiting the nubby, readymade potentials of consumer-grade paint additives. Thomason achieves a similarly textural surface by adding marble dust to oil pigment, and exploring a gestural language indebted to notions of the body, language, and punctuation marks.

The artists’ joint Teen Party outing will pair Thomason’s mid-sized canvases with a new site-specific wall installation by Halley. Halley will also present a large Day-Glo canvas from 1981. Let us celebrate Roll-a-Tex and marble dust! Let us ponder the sinuous curve, the unyielding cell, the topography of surfaces begging to be palpated! (But don’t. Really, don’t.)

Teen Party is an apartment-based gallery helmed by editor Scott Indrisek and designer Ariela Gittlen. It is open to the public during exhibition launches, and by appointment. Located at 874 Greene Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, it is easily accessible via the Myrtle Broadway J/M or Kosciuszko J stop.