OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Tony DeLap was born in 1927 in Oakland, Califonria. DeLap grew up in the Bay Area and studied art, illustration, and graphic design at the San Francisco Academy of Art and the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. He toyed for years between the so-called fine- and commercial-art spheres before settling on the artist track. In 1960 he had his first solo museum show, and by the middle of the decade, he was being included in major national surveys of contemporary art. In 1965 he moved to Southern California to teach at UC Irvine, where he remained until retiring in 1991.
DeLap`s wide-ranging interests over the years-from architecture to phenomenology, trout fishing to magic tricks-have provided him a wide array of images and ideas with which to shape the evolution of his work. From the box paintings of the 1960`s, to the illusionary installations of the 1970`s, and on to the coolly elegant, dimensional, monochrome paintings of the present, DeLap has distinguished himself through the conceptual clarity of his practice.
DeLap`s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Along with numerous solo exhibitions, DeLap was included in several group exhibitions of the 1960s including; Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum; American Sculpture of the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Responsive Eye at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. DeLap's work is in many private and public collections, including the San Jose Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and The Tate Gallery, London, among others. The artist currently lives and works in Corona del Mar, California.