Allen Maddox, A Tribute

13 - 29 October 2000 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
The recent death of painter Allen Maddox marks the end of an era in New Zealand art. As Maddox’s friend and art dealer Gary Langsford writes: ‘Along with his two closest friends, Philip Clairmont and Tony Fomison, Maddox was the last of a certain type of artist who epitomised the romantic notion of the dedicated artist struggling in his garret…’ Allen Maddox, A Tribute presents works from Wellington public and private collections to honour the painter and attest to the lasting vitality and significance of his work.

Maddox was born in Liverpool, England in 1948, and emigrated to New Zealand in 1963. He met Philip Clairmont while studying at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, between 1967 and 1968. Maddox was later introduced to Tony Fomison, and the three painters remained close friends until Clairmont’s death in 1984 and Fomison’s in 1990. Maddox exhibited widely throughout his career and his work is included in many public and private collections. He died in Napier on 23 August 2000 aged 51.

Maddox’s oeuvre stands as probably the most thorough and impassioned instance of abstract expressionist art yet produced in this country. His paintings combine free gesture and vibrant colour with expressionism’s apparent antithesis, a persistent structural element. Maddox’s characteristic X motif first appeared in 1976 when the artist crossed out one of his earlier failed paintings. Dominating his 25 year career, the grids of crosses in boxes became a device through which Maddox could explore both the order and disorder of art and life.

As Hamish Keith observes, in Maddox’s more recent works ‘the grid… has now folded in on itself, curving away into the painting, shattering and flying apart and opening up into a new kind of space.’ The two recent paintings in the exhibition show no let up in Maddox’s power as a choreographer of brushstroke and colour. They have that rare paradoxical quality which Thelonious Monk called ‘ugly beauty’—they can be tough and difficult yet also unaccountably affirming and even, at times, transcendent.

 

Gregory O’Brien & Rebecca Wilson