Neo-geo

Neo-Geo (short for 'Neo-Geometric Conceptualism') is a term that came into use in the early and mid-1980s in the United States, above all in New York, to describe the work of a group of artists whose art critically reflected on the mechanisation, consumerism and total commercialisation of the modern world. Neo-Geo combined a cold, impersonal geometric abstraction with a conceptual and theoretical stance, drawing on postmodern ideas of simulation and the critique of the sign. The artists deliberately borrowed the formal language of early abstract art and Minimalism but stripped it of spiritual or utopian pretensions, turning it into an empty, ironically quoted sign. The leading figures of the movement are considered to be Peter Halley, who painted bright canvases with 'cells' and 'conduits' as metaphors for alienated urban space, as well as Jeff Koons with his glossy objects of mass culture, Haim Steinbach and Ashley Bickerton. Neo-Geo reflected the mood of critical Postmodernism, in which art analyses its own commodity nature and place within the sign systems of late capitalism, and it became a notable phenomenon of the late twentieth-century art market.