Anthony Cudahy Born 1989, Fort Myers, FL (US)
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY (US)

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) received his MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY (US) in 2020. His solo exhibition Spinneret debuted at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME (US), and travelled to the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, TX (US) in 2024, accompanied by a dedicated publication. Cudahy held his first solo museum exhibition in 2023, titled Conversation, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole in France. His work has also been included in numerous international group exhibitions.

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 David and Indre Roberts Collection, London (UK); Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, 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 (FR); Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, FL (US); Musée d’art Moderne de Paris, Paris (FR); The New York Historical, New York, NY (US); Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY (US); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), among others.

GRIMM represents the artist in collaboration with Hales and Semiose.