Anthony Cudahy

Anthony Cudahy combines a wide variety of references in his painting: masterpieces of art history, archives of queer culture, gay iconography as well as personal and family recollections. Inspired by photographs that he decomposes from one painting to another producing a serial effect, Cudahy incorporates these images in a chain of transformations, infusing each new iteration with different affects and his own musings. His repertoire, with its flowers, expressions of love and portraits of youthful men, explores romantic, tender and intimate registers.

Subdued, as if suspended, Cudahy’s painting is derived from a sense of the dramatic. At the center of his more complicated compositions, captured in ambiguous situations or broken narratives, the human figure emerges as a focal point. The exploration of individuality is rendered by the delicate manner in which faces and expressions are portrayed, compared with the bodies and settings, which are composed of broad, energetic brush strokes and abstract flat tints. Chromatic aberrations and vivid contrasts of acidic colors create an imbalance and unite contradictions that would otherwise appear irreconcilable.

Anthony Cudahy graduated from the Hunter College in 2020. His first solo exhibition in a European public institution was held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole in 2023. In 2024, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art will present his first institutional exhibition in the United States. He has participated in several one-person exhibitions across the USA most notably at 1969 Gallery and Deli Gallery in New York as well as at Farewell Books in Austin, TX. His works have been included in group exhibitions in New York at Perrotin, Hales Gallery, and at Pace Gallery (Hong Kong), amongst others.