Allen Maddox is remembered as being one of New Zealand's finest exponents of abstract expressionism. His work, spanning over three decades, investigates the tensions between structure and gesture, primarily utilising the motifs of grids and crosses.

'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.) The grids echo the canvas shape while the crosses both negate the grid and fill it in. Variations on these arrangements allowed Maddox to experiment with colour and brushstroke, enlivening the canvas with work that speaks about the spontaneous act of painting as well as aesthetic judgement and consideration.

Allen Maddox was born in Liverpool, England in 1948. He moved to New Zealand in 1963 and passed away in Napier, in 2000.