Tony Coleing was born in Warrnambool, Victoria in 1942. He spent his early childhood at Smithtown, NSW, his teenage years at Maffra, Victoria before studying at the National Art School in Sydney from 1958 to 1959. He lived in England from 1963 to 1967. Since returning to Australia in 1967, Tony Coleing has lived most of his adult life either in Sydney or on the Mid North Coast. Coleing is still a full-time, practising artist.

Coleing has been exhibiting regularly since the mid 1960’s in solo and group exhibitions. He had his first major solo exhibition at Gallery A, Sydney and Melbourne, in 1969, and since then has had numerous individual exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. Coleing was included in ‘The Field’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968, he represented Australia in the 1980 Venice Biennale and was chosen to represent Australia in the international survey of painting and sculpture at the opening show of the Museum of Modern Art’s new galleries in New York in 1984. He is represented in many regional and state galleries, the National Gallery of Australia as well as a number of overseas galleries.

In 1969 the Melbourne critic, Patrick McCaughey, reviewed Coleing’s first one-man show, seeing an artist who, as he put it;

“… emerges as the most enterprising, original, and developed new sculptor in the country.’

He went on to say;

‘… If incongruity becomes the true soul of wit under Coleing’s hands, he achieves it through a startling coup d’etat.’

- Patrick McCaughey, The Age, 16 April, 1969

In the 2000 Craftsman House publication, Australian Painting Now, Louise Martin Chew wrote,

‘Tony Coleing is a maverick whose art defies classification. Since the 1960’s he has worked with media ranging through painting, sculpture, printmaking, collaborative works with other artists, and installation. Similarly, his art has progressed through stylistic metamorphoses from the minimalism of his 1968 work for ‘The Field’ exhibition to social satire. The inventiveness of this output has militated against its popular reception, as Coleing’s audience has to progress through ideas as quickly as he does, without the comfort of predictability.’

She concluded,

‘Coleing’s concerns and observations evolve with the times, but he remains a sceptic, an outsider, not captive of any ideology or belief system and at war with complacency. It is self-cast dissension that makes his work a deeply relevant and caustic commentary on the issues of our times.’

- Louise Martin Chew, Australian Painting Now, Craftsman House 2000, pp.100-103