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 is graduated from the New York Pratt Institute in 2011 and from the Hunter College in 2020. He is active in several collectives and has produced numerous artists’ books. He is co-curator of a publishing project entitled “Slow Youth” and is regularly involved in the organization of the group’s projects. He has participated in a 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 Gallery, Hales Gallery, and at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, (GA) amongst others.