Anthony Cudahy’s figurative paintings piece together enigmatic scenes of specific objects and equivocal environments from interwoven references drawn from Queer archives, art history, film, poetry, friends, and his own autobiography. His fluid application of paint and idiosyncratic palette—at moments sullen, earthen, corporeal and at others high-key, acidic, artificial—animates the ongoing push and pull between the real and surreal across his practice. Through his art, Cudahy explores the hazy slippages of subjectivity in the digital age. Within these moments, Cudahy contemplates love and friendship. His husband, the photographer Ian Lewandowski, frequently appears as the artist’s muse, found reading, sleeping, or entwined. Wrapped around his scenes of intimacy are meditations on death and its politics. From the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Cudahy examines these periods of crises with homages to artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, and more germane views of crowds congregating during lockdowns.
Along with recent solo exhibitions at Grimm Gallery, London; Hales Gallery; Museum of Fine Arts, Dole in France; Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam; and Hales Gallery, New York, Cudahy has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the ICA, Miami and FLAG Art Foundation. His work is represented in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others.
[excerpted from Grimm website: www.grimmgallery.com]
Ian Lewandowski is a photographer from Northwest Indiana. In 2019 he completed an MFA at SUNY Purchase. His first solo exhibition, Community Board, was exhibited at The Java Project in Brooklyn in 2019. The Ice Palace Is Gone, his body of color photographs made from 2018-19, was published as his first monograph by Magic Hour Press in 2021. He also teaches undergraduate photography courses at The New School and SUNY Purchase, and manages and prints the photo work of Kenny Gardner (1913-2002).
