Antony Donaldson

ANTONY DONALDSON  British, born 1939

Antony Donaldson studied at the Slade School of Art, London, during the same time as his contemporaries were developing their brand of Pop Art at the Royal College of Art.

It was, however in 1962, whilst teaching at the Chelsea School of Art, where he met Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones. It was in that year too, when Antony Donaldson developed the simplified treatment of the female figure that typified his work over the next decade. These youthful, sexually confident women, strike flirtatious poses and reveal themselves almost wantonly to the viewer’s gaze.

When the opportunity to travel to the United States presented itself in 1966, Antony Donaldson chooses to settle not in New York but in Los Angeles, where he remained for two years before returning to London.

Although Antony Donaldson’s early work fits comfortably into the mainstream of Pop both in their subject matter of pin-ups and racing cars and in their references to packing, poster design, photography and cinema, he introduced a new twist on such motifs in the fibreglass sculptures he began making in 1968, which reinterprets details of Art Deco architecture into blatantly synthetic object coated in a dazzling coat of paint.

Antony Donald son has received many awards including:
1962                 Second Prize Guinness Award
1962-1963        Post Graduate Scholarship in Fine Art at London University
1963                 Second Prize, John Moores Open Competition, Liverpool
1966-1968        Harkness Foundation Fellowship to the USA
1970                 Field & Sons Co. Ltd. The prize, Bradford print Biennale
 
Public collections include:
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Arts Council of Great Britain, London
Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Berardo Collection, Belem Cultural Centre, Lisbon, Portugal
Braford City Art Gallery
British Council
British Museum, London
Contemporary Art Society, London
Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany
Foundation Stuyvesant, London
Government Art Collection, London
Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal
Hedendaagse Kunst, Utrecht, The Netherlands
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
Sintra Museum of Modern Art
Stuyvesant Foundation
Tate, London
Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool