Allen Maddox
21 November - 16 December 2006
Allen Maddox passed away at the Hawkes Bay Hospital on the evening of Wednesday 23 August 2000. His death was end of an era in the history of contemporary New Zealand art - with his two closest friends, artists Philip Clairmont and Tony Fomison, he was the last of a certain type of painter who epitomised the romantic notion of the artist struggling in his garret and dedicated to create.
Gow Langsford Gallery, in association with John Leech Gallery, presented a major exhibition of work by Maddox. This exhibition presented a comprehensive survey of works from throughout Maddox’s career, with the release of a substantial body of work from the late 1970’s that has only recently surfaced. The large body of paintings and works on paper from the artist’s estate were accompanied by works on loan from private collections to provide a captivating insight into Maddox’s oeuvre.
“Maddox describes his decision to be an abstract expressionist as a ‘great liberating force’. ‘The grid’ he says, he adopted as a ‘compositional device to express myself’. There seems to be a nice little paradox buried in that; grids being the epitome of order and intellectual arrangement and expressionism being, well, something else entirely.” (Hamish Keith, Allen Maddox, exhibition catalogue, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, 1996.)
With a career spanning over three decades, Maddox remains an important and powerful figure within the history of New Zealand painting. With an uncompromising bold and expressive style, Maddox’s legacy is synonymous with his obsession with the cross and grid motifs. Open to numerous interpretations, Maddox’s use of the cross can be viewed as an act of negation, the signature of anonymity, or within a Christian context the symbol of Christ. “There seems to be a nice little paradox buried in that; grids being the epitome of order and intellectual arrangement and expressionism being, well something else entirely . . . It is the painted resolution of what is only, after all, an intellectual dilemma that gives Maddox’s work its power and rakish charm.” (Hamish Keith, Allen Maddox, Gow Langsford Gallery exhibition catalogue,1996.) Maddox’s works span a spectrum of emotions from tormented rage to euphoria, but always sustain a presence of unbounded energy, evident right through to the last works produced in his extraordinary artistic lifetime.
The first major solo publication was produced on Maddox’s work to co-incide with the survey exhibition, and is fully illustrated with a contribution by leading art writer Ian Wedde. To order a copy for $39.95 please contact the gallery.