Anthony Cudahy's new paintings, on view in Amsterdam from August 29 to October 18, 2025, weave imagery from photo archives, art history, film stills, hagiographic icons, and personal photographs to examine queer identity and tenderness. The figurative paintings and drawings draw on extensive historical research and autobiographical narratives to negotiate loneliness, isolation, desire, and safety. Figures appear reading, scrolling, touching, conversing, crouching, and reclining in domestic and natural settings, often facing away with longing glances. Cudahy begins with collages and sketches from vernacular queer and family photo archives, iterating compositions through focused attention to color, mark-making, and medium.
GRIMM is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Anthony Cudahy, on view at the Amsterdam gallery from August 29 to October 18, 2025. Cudahy weaves imagery culled from photo archives, art history, film stills, hagiographic icons and personal photographs to explore themes of queer identity and tenderness. His evocative figurative paintings and drawings are informed by extensive historical research. They negotiate feelings of loneliness, isolation, desire, and safety through the lens of the artist's own autobiographical narratives and crafted mythologies.
In 1961 Henri Lefebvre wrote in his Critique of the Everyday Life, "Everyday life does not exist as a generality." Cudahy's paintings are exemplary in illustrating this argument. His figures read magazines or scroll through their phones in domestic interiors, brush shoulders or clasp hands in passing, converse in crowds, crouch in unmarked spaces, and lay idly among floral fields or wrinkled sheets. They face away from the viewer, their eyes casting longing glances in directions outside of the composition.
Erotic, somber, celebratory, and private, these are not moments of anonymous mundanity but scenes of the specific extraordinary-ness produced within the everyday. Cudahy often begins with collages and sketches from his photo-references, finding inspiration in a variety of vernacular queer photo archives or his own great uncle Kenny Gardener's extensive photo collection archived by his partner Ian Lewandowski. Moving through a variety of iterations from these vignettes, he generates compositions through acute attention to color and mark-making.
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