MADDOX, CONROY (British, 1912-2005)

Painter, essayist and collagist, Conroy Maddox made contact with the Parisian surrealists in 1937-38. Despite his protest against the inclusion of non-surrealist exhibitors in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in 1936, Maddox did join the English group in 1939. Since then, he took part in all of its activities and collaborated in its various publications, London Bulletin, Arson, Message from Nowhere and Free Unions Libres 1946, for which he designed the cover. Maddox’ pictorial creativity had unfolded mainly along two complementary, but very different axes. On the one hand, he has pursued investigations in automatism, in particular by way of ‘écrémage’, a process he invented combining the techniques of ‘décalcomania’ and scratching, producing semi-abstract landscapes in which weird wiry creatures pop up, reminiscent of Yves Tanguy’s work at the time. On the other hand, Maddox has tirelessly surveyed the eccentric quarters of an imaginary city where each street, each house and each park is the site for strange encounters and baroque conflicts. In this respect, one may say that Maddox’s paintings have added more than one enchanting page to the book of the ‘great surrealist promenades’, which go from Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou to Aragon’s Paysage de Paris. Maddox possesses in the highest degree the art of arousing the genius of the place; it is probably he who, with the metaphysical stride of de Chirico and Magritte, has evoked the mystery of passages and arcades with the most lucidly critical spirit, without ever losing the sense of the marvellous.
Maddox organised the landmark exhibition Surrealism Unlimited 1960-1978, at the Camden Art Centre in London and participated in numerous other surrealist exhibitions in England and abroad, notably in London, Zwemmer Gallery, 1940, Paris, 1947, Exeter, 1967, London, 1971, Chicago, 1976 and Lyon, 1981.

Public collections include:
British Museum, London
Gallerie Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds
Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York
Tate, London
Ulster Museum, Belfast
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Bibliography
S. LEVY, Conroy Maddox: Surreal Enigmas, Keele University Press, 1995; - S.LEVY, The Scandalous Eye. The Surrealism of Conroy Maddox., Liverpool University Press, 2003.