Tony Hill (b.1949)

Black and White

Sculpture

109.5cm x 4.9 cm x 4.9cm

Courtesy of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

Tony Hill was born in Natal, South Africa, and brought up in Yorkshire. Having attended the Manchester College of Art and Design and the Maidstone College of Art, in 1972 Hill went to the the State Academy, Dusseldorf, to study under Joseph Beuys. Working primarily with photography and installation, he received a Higher Diploma in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. In 1975 Hill was appointed Lecturer in Fine Art, in the School of Art and Design at the Ulster Polytechnic, responsible for teaching across Fine Art, including Experimental Media, and then at the University of Ulster at Belfast where he became Director of the Master of Fine Art Course from 1991 to 2003.

Hill’s installations, sculpture, drawings, photographs and films work have been included in many one-person shows as well as in numerous group and thematic shows in Ireland and abroad. In 2017 a retrospective exhibition at the FE McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge drew on Hill’s five decades as an artist. His work is included in various private and public collections and he is represented by the Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast.

Hill refers to the influence of American artists whom he discovered through a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Art of the Real USA 1948 – 68 showed contemporary work by 33 artists including Kenneth Noland, Donald Judd, Frank Stella and Barnett Newman, who were making abstract art that was, maximal in colour and minimal in form and which marked an unprecedented interaction between painting and sculpture.