Anthony Cudahy: Double Spar
Hales and GRIMM are delighted to announce Double Spar, a dual solo exhibition by Anthony Cudahy, opening 9 October 2023. Marking the artist's first solo project in the UK, a new body of work will be on view at both Hales Gallery's Shoreditch space and GRIMM's Mayfair location. The exhibitions coincide with Frieze London and follow on from Conversation, Cudahy's solo institutional debut at Musée des Beaux-Arts Dole, France, and precedes his first US museum solo at Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine.
Cudahy is a painter whose tender scenes reveal the nuanced complexities of life. His work speaks to the legacy of figurative painting and portraiture, deftly combining historic references with contemporary life and human connection. Looking to allegorical paintings with multiple readings, motifs become a part of his visual lexicon, creating a world for stories. The exhibition across both spaces, combines large-scale canvases rich interplays and intimate moments. Accompanying the exhibition is a book of reference material, essays and an original written piece by Cudahy.
The show takes its title, Double Spar, from an Icelandic sunstone which causes the sightline through the crystal to appear doubled. Interpreted in medieval texts as a celestial vision, the stone speaks to an early kind of magic, both symbolic and physical. Cudahy explores this idea of doubling: subtle dual associations appear in companion paintings, as recurrent gestures and pairings of figures. Mirroring is used as compositional and narrative device to expand the material potential outside the space of the scenes. Repetitions of the same figure at different times of day within a painting evoke astral projections, and a meta exploration of time extends across both exhibition spaces through companion paintings.
Cudahy continues to paint multiple iterations of the same people, who are sometimes 'acting' or sometimes 'themselves,' challenging the conventions and cultural understanding of portraiture. Still drawing from art history, Cudahy is now deconstructing scenes to expertly form elemental features, collaging ideas in his paintings. In Double Spar, a repeated foot without a shoe is a nod to a Breughel, a pose is borrowed from Perugino's St Sebastian and details from a Titian are woven into the paintings. Contemporaneous artworks are referenced with a Billy Sullivan photograph and an EJ Hauser painting, displayed in domestic settings. Quoting from art history, the interpretation of subtle motifs is left open ended.
In this new body of paintings, Cudahy has challenged himself to create spaces with a different logic - there is a more complex and varying application of paint, figures coalesce, coming together and dissolving just as easily. For Cudahy, how the paint is handled has its own narrative potential, in texture, brushstrokes, cropping and use of colour. There is a sense of multiple possibilities playing out within and outside Cudahy's surfaces, encapsulating moments suspended in time.
Cudahy (b.1989 Florida, USA) received a BFA from Pratt Institute, NY in 2011 and completed an MFA at Hunter College, NY in 2020. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
He has had solo exhibitions with GRIMM, Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2022; Hales New York, NY, USA in 2021; Semiose Gallery, Paris, France in 2021 and 1969 Gallery, New York, NY, USA in 2018. In 2021 he presented work with Ian Lewandowski in It Was Dark in His Arms at Deli Gallery, New York, NY, USA. He has been shown in various international group exhibitions, including Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections form ICA Miami's Collection, ICA Miami, FL, USA in 2022; and I will wear you in my heart of heart, FLAG Art Foundation, NY, USA, Equal Affections, GRIMM, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in between, ours at Hales New York, USA and Tidal Motion, PPOW, Provincetown, MA, USA in 2021; and The Moon Seemed Lost, Hales New York, USA in 2020. Cudahy's work has been featured in Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, The London Magazine, Cultured Mag, the Paris Review, and he was one of the Artsy Vanguard artists of 2022.
His work can be found in collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, USA; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Hort Family Collection, NY, USA; Kunstmuseum, The Hague, the Netherlands; Les Arts au Mur Artothèque de Pessac, Pessac, France; Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
