Tony DeLap

Tony DeLap (b. 1927, Oakland, CA; d. 2019, Corona Del Mar, CA) has exhibited extensively since 1953. Initially brought to the attention of New York gallerist Robert Elkon by Agnes Martin in the early 1960s, DeLap’s earliest exhibited works — precisely constructed painted aluminum sculptures — challenged viewers’ perceptions of positive and negative space. Having originally worked extensively with collage, DeLap’s early sculptures presented an idiosyncratic articulation of layered space in a decisively Minimalist mode. Further, throughout the 1960s, DeLap effectively represented a generation of West Coast artists who moved away from spiritual abstraction toward conceptual, cerebral practices. By the mid-1970s, as his approach to object and architecture continued to evolve, DeLap was creating monochromatic shaped canvas paintings. Soon thereafter he incorporated interventions of hard-edged, painted color in his canvases.

At its core, DeLap’s work explores how the interaction of geometric shapes can create dimensionality and movement on static planes. In a 1980 essay, DeLap explains: “It is the discrepancy between the front edge or plane, and the back edge or plane, that is the primary content of the work. This discrepancy sets up an agitation with the wall and gives the paintings a somewhat unsettled physical appearance.” As Barbara Rose wrote in her 2014 essay Now You See It, Now You Don’t: “choosing to work with geometric form, [DeLap] focused on the elements of process and materials to establish a new critical language of visual exactitude…challeng[ing] and transcend[ing] the categorical differences between painting and sculpture….” The illusionistic quality of DeLap’s work is captivating, but it is the transcendence of the media with which DeLap chooses to work that stretches the viewer’s visual experience to new lengths.

Tony DeLap attended California College of Arts and Crafts (Oakland, CA) in 1944; Menlo Junior College (Menlo Park, CA) from 1945-47; Academy of Art (San Francisco, CA) from 1947-49; and Claremont Graduate School (Claremont, CA) from 1949-50. DeLap has been included in such landmark exhibitions as The Responsive Eye at Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum (New York, NY), and American Sculpture of the Sixties at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA). In 2018, the Laguna Museum of Art mounted a major Tony DeLap retrospective comprising works dating from 1961-2018, curated by Peter Frank and accompanied by a fully illustrated publication. Delap’s work resides in the permanent collections of Tate Modern (London, UK), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), and Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, CH), among many others.

The Estate of Tony DeLap is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.