1. Tony Urquhart was recognized in the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of Canada's pioneering abstractionists, having been variously linked with the Toronto painters associated with The Isaacs Gallery and The Heart of London group that included Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe and Murray Favro.
Since the 1960s Urquhart has followed an independent and autonomous path in his art, centred upon his distinctive "box" format.
Tony Urquhart was an artist in the sense that she liked landscaping the grounds of our house, which were considerable, given the fact that we lived in the centre of the town of Niagara Falls on half an acre.
Tony Urquhart had ponds made; there was a wood; there was an old barn in the back of the house.
Between 1954 and 1958 Tony Urquhart was trained at Yale University summer school.
Tony Urquhart attended the Albright Art School with Seymore Drumlevitch, a painter in Western New York; Larry Calcagno who showed with the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York; advertising design teacher Don Nicholls; and Robert Bruce, a Canadian who taught illustration.
In 1956, Isaacs asked Tony Urquhart to join his growing stable of artists, including Michael Snow, Joyce Weiland and Graham Coughtry.
Tony Urquhart had his first works shown at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto when he was only 22.
Tony Urquhart had a one-man show in January 1957 and a second in November of the same year with Isaacs.
At the time, Tony Urquhart's influence was from Buffalo, directly from the New York Abstract Expressionists and in 1956 the influence of this movement was still new to the Toronto public.
Tony Urquhart lived in Niagara Falls until September 1960 when he went to London to be the first artist-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario.
The university's McIntosh Art Gallery was the first university art gallery in Ontario, and opened in 1942, but it wasn't until Tony Urquhart was appointed artist-in-residence that the gallery really took off.
Essentially, Tony Urquhart ran the place for four years starting in 1960, mounting approximately ten shows each year.
Tony Urquhart was one of a handful of artists responsible for generating the excitement and community engagement that garnered national acclaim for the growing London art scene during the late 1960s.
Tony Urquhart stayed at the University of Western Ontario in a teaching capacity until 1972 when he joined the faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo, where he remained for three decades, retiring in 1999.
Tony Urquhart collaborated with Gary Michael Dault on the making of Cells of Ourselves: Drawings by Tony Urquhart, as well as Off the Wall, a hundred and three idea-drawings for boxes with commentary by Michael Phillips.
Tony Urquhart worked on book illustration which put him in collaboration with such authors as his wife Jane, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Matt Cohen Stuart MacKinnon and Louis Dudek.
Tony Urquhart's work is found in the permanent collections of such public institutions as New York's Museum of Modern Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris; the Museo Civico in Lugano; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
In 1958 Tony Urquhart embarked on the first of what would become annual, if not more frequent, stays in Europe, attracted to what he called the "otherness" of the visual experiences there, especially the landscape, architecture and pilgrimage sites such as Lourdes and Vimy Ridge in France.
Tony Urquhart made a study of 19th and 20th century French cemeteries from Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to the hundreds of small country graveyards outside of humble villages throughout France.
In 1965 Tony Urquhart began to make paintings on boxes, which required the viewer to move around to see the whole work.
Tony Urquhart was named to the Order of Canada in 1995.
Tony Urquhart was the winner of the 2009 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, and the CARFAC Outstanding Contribution Award.
In 1976, Tony Urquhart married the Canadian novelist and poet Jane Tony Urquhart.
Tony Urquhart died from complications of a fall on January 26,2022, at the age of 87.
Tony Urquhart was buried at Drummond Hill Cemetery in Niagara Falls, Ontario.