FREE with museum admission
FREE for Members
Auditorium

Critic and art historian Barbara Rose and Albright-Knox Chief Curator Emeritus Douglas Dreishpoon will engage artist Tony DeLap in a conversation around his long and distinguished career. A six-minute trailer, created for the occasion by director Dale Schierholt from his film on DeLap, will prime the conversation.

A legendary figure in Californian art, Tony DeLap (born 1927) was associated with Los Angeles’ 1960s Finish Fetish school (alongside the likes of Craig Kaufman and Larry Bell), and has been a mentor to some of California’s most notable artists, including Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, and John McCracken, who all studied with him. Where many artists of the Finish Fetish school eschewed the material facture of their works, DeLap has almost always chosen to construct his work himself, meticulously producing freestanding sculptures in aluminum, fiberglass, lacquer, Plexiglas, resin, and molded plastics and fabrics. He followed a path of Geometric abstraction and Minimal art embracing the principles of limited color, geometry, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor. DeLap was included in the two shows that helped to define the Minimalist movement—Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum (1966) and American Sculpture of the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967)—and his work brilliantly merges the austerity of Minimalism with Op art illusionism. A monograph recently published by Radius Books, with a foreword by Douglas Dreishpoon and a substantial text by Barbara Rose, fleshes out the full spectrum of DeLap’s achievements.

Critic, art historian, and teacher Barbara Rose is one of the foremost authorities on modern American art. Since the 1960s Rose has been a formidable presence in the art world, writing about timely subjects with insight and clarity. Her landmark survey of Twentieth-Century American painting and sculpture, American Art Since 1900, set the bar for serious work in this burgeoning field, and her essays and reviews on contemporary art, published in Art International, Art in America, Artforum, as well as the many museum catalogues she has authored, likewise provide new portals of understanding to the diverse arts of the post–World War II period.

Copies of Tony DeLap: Paintings, Sculptures & Works on Paper (Radius Books, 2014) will be available in Shop AK during this weekend's events.