Anthony Cudahy Biography
American painter Anthony Cudahy weaves personal histories and crafted mythologies into figurative compositions, revealing the poetic nuances of day-to-day life.
Early Years
Cudahy was born in Fort Myers, Florida. He received a BFA from Pratt Institute, New York in 2011, and an MFA from Hunter College, New York in 2020.
Anthony Cudahy Artworks
Figurative Paintings
Cudahy draws from personal photographs, film stills, and references to art history. Weaving personal and fictional narratives, the artist taps into intimate moments of human experience, exploring feelings of loneliness, isolation, and desire within the mundane nature of the everyday. Figures and settings are often seen to coalesce in vignettes that combine a broad range of painterly techniques, including fluid brushwork, incidental mark-making, thick impasto, patterning, and use of phosphorescent colour.
Drawing and Collage
Cudahy has also worked in collage and drawing, often using colouring pencils. Referencing imagery from queer photo archives and family photo collections, Cudahy’s drawings reflect the artist’s considered process of mark-making.
Exhibitions
Anthony Cudahy has presented work in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Select solo exhibitions include Coral Room, Hales Gallery, New York (2021); and Burn Across the Breeze, 1969 Gallery, New York (2021).
Select group exhibitions include Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); Equal Affections, GRIMM, Amsterdam (2021); If on a winter’s night a traveller, MAMOTH, London (2020); and THEM, Perrotin, New York (2019).
Collections
Anthony Cudahy’s artworks can be found in major international collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Les arts au mur Artothèque, Pessac; and Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, among others.
Galleries
Anthony Cudahy is represented by Hales Gallery, London, New York and also Semiose, Paris. In 2022, GRIMM also announced their representation of the artist, with a solo exhibition planned for the year too.
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.