GRIMM is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of Anthony Cudahy's Eveningdawn (Reverse Pareidoliac Figure) (2022) by the Stedelijk Museum, 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.
This painting was on view in Cudahy’s recent exhibition a pearl caught between my teeth at GRIMM Amsterdam. Within his latest body of work Cudahy reflects on the enmeshed categories of humanity and nature through their borderless relationship with each other. The exhibition took its title from a line in a poem by Paul Legault, titled Ok. In these works, Cudahy questions whether nature is ambivalent or even antagonistic to humanity, while insisting on its personified poetics. Boundaries between subjects dissolve as they move into the landscape themselves, caught between realms of animation as seen in works such as Eveningdawn (Reverse Pareidoliac Figure). In the painting, Legault himself is depicted with his husband, their bent and reclining bodies entangled with the excess of a sun’s light and shadow.
Exhibition history:
a pearl caught between my teeth, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL), 29 October - 22 December 2022
