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 presents 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.

Drew Dodge’s paintings, part human part canine figures often take part in suggestive activities, bathed in moonlight, in desert landscapes or perhaps in the setting of a ranch. An impression of tenderness and a peculiar eroticism emerge from the physical relationships between beings and objects. By softening the bristly texture of his colorful creatures, Dodge summons a balance between chaos, ecstasy, pleasure and pain. His masterful works bring together three artistic traditions: Religious painting from the European Renaissance and its powerfully structured pictorial spaces and intertwining bodies; American desert mysticism and its powerful symbolism; the cartoon, with its strange and seductive mix of animal and human characters.
 
Drew Dodge (b. 2001, Monterey, California, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He recently graduated as a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in Providence. His already acclaimed work has featured in several exhibitions in the USA and Europe. 

Since the 1990s, Françoise Pétrovitch has produced one of the most powerful bodies of work on the French art scene. Amongst the numerous media she has explored—ceramics, glass, ink washes, painting, print and video—drawing retains pride of place. In constant dialog with the artists who have preceded her, she has been able to measure herself against the incontrovertible motifs of “high art”­­—Saint Sebastian, still lifes, etc. Pétrovitch’s art reveals an ambiguous world, willingly transgressive, playing with conventional boundaries and eluding any interpretation. Intimacy, fragments of life and disappearance, alongside the themes such as the double, transition and cruelty run through her work, which is inhabited by animals, flowers and beings, and whose atmosphere fluctuates between light and dark, rarely leaving the spectator unmoved.

She has enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions both in France and abroad, as in the Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc in Landerneau and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, in 2022, and the Musée de la Vie romantique, Paris, in 2023. In 2018, she was the first contemporary artist to be awarded a solo exhibition at the Louvre-Lens. Over the past few years, Pétrovitch has produced monumental wall drawings and large format ensembles, for the Galerie des Enfants at the Centre Pompidou, the West Bund Museum, Shanghai, or for the Ballets du Nord Company. Her works are included in many private and public collections, most notably the Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR), the Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar (NL), the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (US), the Musée Jenisch, Vevey (CH), the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain of Saint-Etienne (FR) and of Strasbourg (FR), the MAC VAL (FR), the Salomon and Guerlain Foundations as well as Emerige Endowment Fund.

Stefan Rinck’s stone figures form a motley and comical community of, for the most part, animals, chimeras and monsters. They wear costumes and masks; are endowed with particular symbols or characteristics, some bear the names of heroes of Greek mythology or of legend. Rinck’s sculpted figures make up a discordant but related assembly of non-humans: they come from elsewhere, an archaic imaginary world, woven from myths and legends. With his collection of fauna, the artist is exploring a comical, imaginary yet realistic vein, breathing new life into its iconography, using a technique typical of the Middle Ages: sculpting his figures directly from stone.

Rinck’s sculptures remind us of the figures of Roman art, which populate the columns and tympana of churches. They share the same morphology and style, the hybrid aspect of the chimera and monster. These are grotesque figures, in which we recognize the vitalist comedy typical of medieval realism which could be observed during the parades of jesters and buffoons at religious and popular festivities. Yet if the Middle Ages seem to color Rinck’s art, its frame of reference in fact crystalizes around a number of “Gothic” obsessions of the Romantic kind: a taste for mythology and folk tales, for different epochs and cultures for the fantastic or figures of hubris and excess.

Stefan Rinck’s work has been subject to many exhibitions in Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Los Angeles, Madrid, Munich, Paris and features in the collections of the Frac Corse, Corte, (FR), the CBK Rotterdam (NL) and the Museum De Hallen, Haarlem (NL). In 2018, the work The mangust of Beauvais is installed permanently in the city of Paris at 53-57 rue de Grennelle (Beaupassage). In 2019, Stefan Rinck is part of the 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow published by Thames & Hudson.

The African-American artist Philemona Williamson (b. 1951) brings together personal and more universal narratives in her brightly colored, large format paintings that portray children and teenagers, often in mysterious situations. She paints directly onto her canvases without preliminary sketches and her paintings thus resemble palimpsests telling their own stories, with multiple layers, figures and scenes appearing across the support, before seemingly being abandoned. Williamson’s works are deeply rooted in her childhood memories and include references to memorabilia, such as dolls typical of American popular culture from the artist’s personal collection, and as such are an invitation to explore mysterious and unfinished tales.

Williamson has been exhibited in numerous American institutions, from her debut solo show at the Queens Museum of Art in 1988, to Metaphorical Narratives, at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, in 2017, which spanned the thirty years of her artistic career. Her works can be seen in many public collections across the USA and she has been commissioned for several public projects, most notably by the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority. In 2022, she was one of fifteen recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman prize, awarded annually since 1986 to women artists over the age of 40, in recognition of their previous and future work.