Nadia Bellingeri
Senior Sale Coordinator
Lot 7AR
Conroy Maddox(British, 1912-2005)The Modern Dance 38.1 x 54.2 cm. (15 x 21 3/8 in.)
Ending from 1 May 2025, 12:00 BST
Online, London, New Bond Street£3,000 - £5,000
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Ingram Reid
Head Of Sale
Robert Jenkinson
Cataloguer
Conroy Maddox (British, 1912-2005)
The Modern Dance
signed and dated 'Conroy Maddox/'41' (lower right); further signed, titled and dated again 'Conroy Maddox/'The Modern Dance' '41' (verso)
gouache on board laid on panel
38.1 x 54.2 cm. (15 x 21 3/8 in.)
signed and dated 'Conroy Maddox/'41' (lower right); further signed, titled and dated again 'Conroy Maddox/'The Modern Dance' '41' (verso)
gouache on board laid on panel
38.1 x 54.2 cm. (15 x 21 3/8 in.)
Footnotes
Provenance
Sale; Philips, London, 2 May 1995, lot 105
Private Collection, U.K.
This gouache of 1941 is typical of the works done by Conroy Maddox in the early years of the war. Given the shortage of canvas and oil paint, he had discovered in his parents' attic a whole bunch of drawing paper, which he used to create sarabands and parades of more or less biomorphic creatures with gouache. Most of them are non-figurative, "pure signifiers" without signifieds - monstrous arrangements of frames, horns, cups, eyes, circles and triangles - mixing geometrical and organic elements in each of them, hardly identifiable but all vaguely reminiscent. Colours are bright, which adds to the energy originating in their disjunctive contiguity. Those proto-historic species are the "erring creatures", the "spectres" which André Breton saw in Yves Tanguy's paintings.
We are grateful to Dr Silvano Levy for his assistance in cataloguing this lot and to Professor Michel Remy for compiling this catalogue entry.