Alan Steele: Unconditionally Constitutional

On the occasion of the exhibition Alan Steele: Unconditionally Constitutional, on view at Westwood Gallery New York, the gallery has published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition. This is his first solo show with Westwood gallery and includes thirty new artworks as well as works from the 1990s which trace the evolution of his artistic vision. The curated exhibition highlights Steele’s concept of retrieving discarded elements from previously completed work and constructing the remnants of abstracted fragments to solve complex ideas of space, time, and identity.

Steele established himself during the early 1970s as a minimalist painter working with mathematical formulae projected on a grid. Foreseeing the limitations of minimal art and painting in 1974, he started a theoretical architectural project derived from the problem of “what is a labyrinth and how would one design one?". The result was a complex labyrinth based on a matrix, soon becoming the foundation for Steele’s future work and a source he continuously references to generate new structures. ​

As an artist who has spent much of his childhood in the West Indies, South America and South East Asia, as well as traveling the world in search of rare tribal artifacts and mythical cultures, Steele is compelled to explore the ‘act of being’ in his artwork. His artistry is a quest to understand theories of knowledge, history and the basic relationship of objects and their attachment to tradition, culture, and global divergence.