Anthony Cudahy (born 1989)[1] is a contemporary American painter who creates figurative compositions that draw on personal photographs, queer archival imagery, art history, and film stills.[1][2][3][4]
Cudahy's work addresses queer experience and the relationship between contemporary figurative painting and its historical precedents.[5] His paintings are often rendered with areas of phosphorescent color against denser, muted passages.[6]
Early life and education
Anthony Cudahy was born in 1989[1] and grew up in Fort Myers, Florida.[2] He moved to New York City[2] and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 2011.[5] 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.[5] 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 queer historical photographs.[4][6][13] By repainting these appropriated images, he shifts their original context[3][14] to surface intimate moments[12] and marginalized stories, particularly those tied to queer experience.[5][6] He cites Caspar David Friedrich as an influence and finds affinity with academic painters like Alexandre Cabanel.[14]
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.[2][5] Cudahy also makes colored pencil drawings.[1]
Critical reception
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]BOMB described his practice as "painting that thinks through other images," noting how he reinterpreted works by neglected and often unattributed older artists.[5]
His work has been described as depicting "queer intimacy in the mundane"[13] and blurring "the mundane and the sacred."[15]
Personal life
Cudahy lives and works in Brooklyn with his husband, photographer Ian Lewandowski.[2]
Exhibitions
Heaven Inside, Uprise Art Outpost, Chelsea, NY, 2014[16]
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[17]
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