GRIMM is pleased to announce the representation of Brooklyn-based painter Anthony Cudahy (b. 1989, Fort Myers, FL, US). GRIMM’s representation and work on behalf of the artist will be shaped in close collaboration with Hales Gallery (London, UK and New York, US) and Semiose Galerie (Paris, FR). GRIMM’s first presentation with Cudahy will be a solo exhibition of new paintings opening November 4, 2022 in Amsterdam (NL).
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.
