Anthony Cudahy
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- Pratt Institute (BFA, 2011)
- Hunter College (MFA, 2020)
Anthony Cudahy | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1989 (age 36–37) |
| Education |
|
| Occupation | Painter |
| Spouse | Ian Lewandowski |
| Website | anthonycudahy |
Anthony Cudahy (born 1989)[1] is a contemporary American painter whose work addresses queer experience and the relationship between contemporary figurative painting and its historical precedents.[2]
He creates figurative compositions that draw on personal photographs, queer archival imagery, art history, and film stills.[1][3][4][5] His paintings are often rendered with areas of phosphorescent color against denser, muted passages.[6]
Anthony Cudahy was born in 1989[1] and grew up in Fort Myers, Florida.[3] He moved to New York City[3] and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 2011.[2] He completed a Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College in 2020.[7]
Career
After graduating from Pratt in 2011, Cudahy worked as a graphic designer for nearly a decade while continuing to paint.[2] In 2013–14, he was an artist-in-residence at the ARTHA Project in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.[8] His first solo exhibition, Heaven Inside, opened at Uprise Art Outpost in 2014.[9] He is represented by GRIMM, Hales Gallery, and Semiose.[10]
Work
Cudahy's paintings pair delicate figural drawing with broad abstract passages.[7] His subjects are often solitary figures or couples in dreamlike, ambiguous settings.[7][11] He repeatedly paints people from his life, including his husband and close friends, in scenes that range from observational portraits to allegorical narratives, open to interpretation.[12][13]
Cudahy works from a personal archive of snapshots, film stills, screenshots, and historical queer photographs.[5][6][13] By repainting these appropriated images, he shifts their original context[4][14] to surface intimate moments[12] and marginalized stories, particularly those tied to queer experience.[2][6] He cites Pieter Bruegel the Elder,[2] Albrecht Dürer,[2] Lucian Freud,[12] Caspar David Friedrich,[14] Chris Ofili,[12] and Jenny Saville[12] as influences.
Cudahy typically works wet-on-wet in long sessions, aiming to complete each painting's first layer in one sitting to preserve its luminosity and energy.[3][2] Cudahy also makes colored pencil drawings.[1]
Critical reception
Cudahy's work has been described as depicting "queer intimacy in the mundane"[13] and blurring "the mundane and the sacred."[15] Artsy called Cudahy "a serious painter who's also an unpredictable storyteller" and "a reliable narrator of the era."[9] Critics have compared his work to that of Peter Doig and Salman Toor;[14] he has also been grouped alongside Janiva Ellis, Genieve Figgis, and Cy Gavin as contemporaries working in a similar figurative mode.[9] L'Express likened Cudahy's precision in drawing and use of color to David Hockney's, and described his éclectisme audacieux (transl. "bold eclecticism") as unmatched among young figurative painters internationally.[16] BOMB described his practice as "painting that thinks through other images," noting how he reinterpreted works by neglected and often unattributed older artists.[2]
Personal life
Cudahy lives and works in Brooklyn with his husband, photographer Ian Lewandowski.[3]
Exhibitions
- Heaven Inside, Uprise Art Outpost, Chelsea, NY, 2014[17]
- Recent Work, Artha Project Space, Long Island City, NY, 2015[8]
- The Fourth Part of the Day, Farewell Books, Austin, TX, 2015[citation needed]
- EatF_3, Mumbo's Outfit, within Geary Contemporary, New York, NY, 2016[18]
- NARSOLIPS, Cooler Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2016[19]
- The Gathering, The Java Project, Brooklyn, NY, 2018[20]
- Night Paintings, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY, 2018[21]
- Anthony Cudahy: Burn Across the Breeze, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY, 2021[22]
- Anthony Cudahy, The Moon Sets a Knife, Semiose Gallery, Paris, France, 2021[23]
- Coral Room, Hales Gallery, New York, NY, 2021[24]
- Anthony Cudahy, Flames, Semiose Gallery, Paris, France, 2021[25]
- Double Spar, dual exhibition: Hales Gallery and GRIMM, London, UK, 2023[15][26][27]
- Conversation, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, France, 2023[2]
- Fool's Gold, Hales Gallery, New York, NY, 2024[28]
- Fool's Errand, Grimm Gallery, London, UK, 2024[29] and Grimm Gallery, New York, NY, 2024[5]
- Spinneret, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine, 2024;[30] traveled to the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, Texas[31]
Collections
Cudahy's work is in the permanent collections of several institutions, including:
- Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD[32]
- Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA[33]
- Dallas Museum of Art, TX[34]
- Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL[35]
- Kunstmuseum, The Hague, the Netherlands[36]
- Les Arts au Mur Artothèque, Pessac, France[37]
- Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France[38]
- New York Historical Society, New York, NY[39]
- Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY[citation needed]
- Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands[40]
