Tony Tascona

Saskatchewan NAC Auction House Biography and Notes

Tony Tascona was born in St. Boniface, Manitoba in 1926. At the age of twenty, after a brief stint in the army, he enrolled as a diploma student at the Winnipeg School of Art, where he graduated in 1950. He continued his education at the University of Manitoba School of Art and was there exposed to modernist movements. At the age of twenty-eight, Tascona had his first exhibition in the Spring Show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In the years to follow he exhibited frequently in both group and solo shows. To support himself and his art-making Tascona took a job with Canadian Aerospace Industries and, later, with Trans-Canada Airlines (now Air Canada). It was here in these industrial environments that Tascona became interested in plastics, metals, and lacquers: the synthetic materials and industrial products that went on to inform his work. In 1962 Tascona relocated to Montreal, meeting Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant, whose hard-edge colour painting and direct, more mathematical approach intersected with his own interest in geometric work. His work is collected throughout Canada, the United States and Japan by private collectors, corporations and private and public galleries. Tony Tascona received the Order of Canada in 1996.