Anthony Cudahy weaves imagery culled from photo archives, art history, film stills, hagiographic icons and personal photographs to explore themes of queer identity and tenderness. His evocative figurative paintings and drawings are informed by extensive historical research. They negotiate feelings of loneliness, isolation, desire, and safety through the lens of the artist’s own autobiographical narratives and crafted mythologies.
In 1961 Henri Lefebvre wrote in his Critique of the Everyday Life, “Everyday life does not exist as a generality.” Cudahy’s paintings are exemplary in illustrating this argument. His figures read magazines or scroll through their phones in domestic interiors, brush shoulders or clasp hands in passing, converse in crowds, crouch in unmarked spaces, and lay idly among floral fields or wrinkled sheets. They face away from the viewer, their eyes casting longing glances in directions outside of the composition. Lit by glowing cyan, rose, violet, or teal hues they have the pulsing energy of a ritual moment both in action and already retired to history.
Erotic, somber, celebratory, and private, these are not moments of anonymous mundanity but scenes of the specific extraordinary-ness produced within the everyday. Cudahy often begins with collages and sketches from his photo-references, finding inspiration in a variety of vernacular queer photo archives or his own great uncle Kenny Gardener’s extensive photo collection archived by his partner Ian Lewandowski. Moving through a variety of iterations from these vignettes, he generates compositions through acute attention to color and mark-making, sustaining a commitment to the mediums he uses as they guide the final works.
Anthony Cudahy (b. 1989 Ft. Myers, FL, US) completed an MFA at Hunter College, New York, NY (US) in 2020. His solo exhibition titled Spinneret at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME (US) has travelled to the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US), on view until 26 January 2025. Spinneret is accompanied by a publication available to order. In 2023 the artist had his first solo museum exhibition, Conversation, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole (FR). He has had solo exhibitions with GRIMM London (UK) and Amsterdam (NL), Hales Gallery, New York, NY (US), Semiose, Paris (FR), and 1969 Gallery, New York, NY (US), among others. He has been shown in various international group exhibitions and was included in GRIMM’s Equal Affections exhibition in Amsterdam (NL) in 2021. Cudahy's work has been featured in T Magazine, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, The London Magazine, Cultured Mag and the Paris Review among others.
His work can be found in collections of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (US); Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA (US); Dallas Museum of Art, TX (US); The Hort Family Collection, New York, NY (US); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (US); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Les Arts au Mur Artothèque de Pessac, Pessac (FR); Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY (US); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL).
GRIMM represents the artist in collaboration with Hales and Semiose.
