Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1960 Jamaica

Year of Migration to the UK: 1972

Other name/s: Tony Daley

Biography

Artist Anthony Daley was born in Jamaica in 1960 and moved to England in 1972 to join his parents who had immigrated to Leeds, Yorkshire. Daley was ‘desperate’ to get to England for education and acknowledged that ‘The way the world works, there are racial groupings, but you have to chase the pinnacle of activity, and that's in the big cities’ (Douglas 2020). As a child in Jamaica, he was exposed to the ‘sheer beauty’ of nature which first sparked his love for colour and abstract forms (Gallery OCA). Daley later recalled his first memory of wanting to paint: ‘I was four. I was in the bushes across the river from where I lived. It had rained and I looked up to the sky with the light coming through. It was the start of a love affair. I just wanted to paint it, to draw it. The sheer blueness of that sky – I had to do it justice’ (Flowers Gallery).

Displaying an early talent for drawing and painting, Daley graduated from Leeds Art University in 1979, before studying at Wimbledon School of Art (1979–82, now Wimbledon College of Arts, part of UAL). He later earned his BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art(1982–83), during which time he was selected for the first ever Artist of the Day exhibition at the Angela Flowers Gallery in 1983. He was then awarded the Pollock-Krasner Painting Fellowship in 1984. In 1997, Daley’s work was included in the landmark survey exhibition Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966–1996 at the Caribbean Cultural Center, New York in 1997, featuring, among others, the work of Sonia Boyce, Sokari Douglas Camp, Uzo Egonu and Ronald Moody. Daley’s large scale abstract paintings are characterised by the use of luminous colours, fluid brushstrokes and a sense of organic movement, showing his commitment to abstraction on the one hand, and his ‘irresistible pull towards Romanticism and beauty’ on the other (Cromwell Place). Although essentially an abstractionist, Daley often begins his paintings with still-life arrangements which he reworks until they dissolve into brushstrokes. Sometimes, it seems that hints ‘of large ghostly human figures’ are ‘hovering in the background’ of his paintings (Carrier, Hyperallergic).

Although Daley thinks that the position of Black artists within the current art market is encouraging, he has stressed his dislike of political art, explaining that as a young artist he felt stifled by the pressure for him to always be featured in black art shows (Douglas 2020). Daley has been the subject of more than 25 solo exhibitions internationally, including in New York, Los Angeles and Zurich. In 2020, his work featured in the inaugural exhibition of London's Gallery OCA, established to champion artists of Caribbean heritage. In 2021, his work was included in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Reclaiming Magic, coordinated by Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA). Daley’s recent exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2022), curated by Lisa Anderson, Managing Director of the Black Cultural Archives, featured a new series of paintings inspired by the work of Peter Paul Rubens – in particular, Venus, Mars and Cupid (c. 1635), in the Dulwich collection. Daley was exposed to Rubens’ work as a child in Jamaica, aged nine, as he scanned books in churches he attended. He explained that the painting caused an important shift in his practice in the 1980s: ‘I became attached to that painting, and challenged by it on many levels – politically, psychologically, technically […] I aggressively went more abstract because of that painting’ (Apollo Magazine 2023). A keen visitor to Dulwich Picture Gallery for decades, Daley rendered Rubens’s figurative scene almost wholly abstract, with Venus, Cupid and Mars reimagined in each picture as bold passages of paint. Daley’s radiant palette with its iridescent blue, orange, yellow, and red, occasionally with black lines running across, appeared as though illuminated from an internal light source, evoking the luminescence of Rubens' classical nudes. The Telegraph art critic Alastair Smart praised Daley’s paintings, noting that ‘It may sound odd for an abstract artist to take inspiration from Rubens, a painter so renowned for his visions of the human body. That’s precisely what helps this display succeed, though. Where a figurative painter might have struggled to avoid weak imitations of Rubens’s masterpiece, Daley's works come across as ruminative responses to it’ (Smart 2022).

Daley has also been teaching art since the mid-1990s, with Chris Ofili among his former students at Chelsea College of Art. Daley currently teaches at The Essential School of Painting (ESOP), an alternative art school based in Wood Green, north London, which specialises in short and year-long courses taught by leading contemporary artists. Examples of his paintings in the UK public domain can be found in the collection of Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust.