GRIMM is pleased to present a pearl caught between my teeth, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Anthony Cudahy, on view at its Amsterdam gallery from October 29 to December 22, 2022. This will be Cudahy’s first solo exhibition with GRIMM since the gallery announced representation of the artist earlier this year.
A book with a new essay by Ricardo Montez will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.
Within his latest body of work, on view in a pearl caught between my teeth, Cudahy reflects on the enmeshed categories of humanity and nature through their borderless relationship with each other. A new series of paintings stems from a tradition of seventeenth century Flemish landscape painting, where trees, flowers, shrubs, and rolling hills form anthropomorphic optical illusions of faces inscribed in the Earth. Cudahy translates this subject matter into the contemporary, mapping his figures into an excess of natural elements through varied painting techniques. Snakes become legs, flowers become abdomens - these works navigate the becoming of landscape for the subjects intimately depicted. The architecture of their surroundings performs a reflection, literally and figuratively, of the many ways we personify, engage with, indulge in, and stand at odds with our environments.
Broken Butterflies, 2022, (detail)
“Cudahy gesturally reproduces objects from everyday life—a cell phone, a belt buckle, a t-shirt—immersing them into a landscape of unfolding possibility. The familiar is constantly opening onto something unfamiliar. The uncanny way that a shell mimics an ankle bone and imposes itself onto the human form that is itself losing its contours to the surrounding landscape produces a feeling of expansiveness...”
- excerpt from a pearl caught between my teeth, Ricardo Montez, October 2022
The exhibition takes its title from a line in a poem by Paul Legault, titled Flowers, Duh. In these works, Cudahy questions whether nature is ambivalent or even antagonistic to humanity, while insisting on its personified poetics. Boundaries between subjects dissolve as they move into the landscape themselves, caught between realms of animation as seen in works such as loop (twilight), 2022 and Eveningdawn (Reverse Pareidoliac Figure), 2022. In the latter, Legault himself is depicted with his husband, their bent and reclining bodies entangled with the excess of a sun’s light and shadow.
Broken Shells (narcissus loop), 2022, (detail)
“In Broken Shells (narcissus loop), he stands, head lowered, supporting himself against what looks like a tiled countertop. Sharing the color scheme of Cudahy’s self-portrait, this canvas is also a scene of carnage. Shells lay broken in a blood red pool that reflects the bereft subject’s image. It seems as if ocean flora, released through an act of violence, have begun to take over [Cudahy's lover's] form, or perhaps this sea life has risen to the surface from within his body, seeking communion with the shattered shells’ inhabitants.”
- excerpt from a pearl caught between my teeth, Ricardo Montez, October 2022
Fear Painting, 2022, (detail)
A series of drawings which accompany the new body of work act as iconographic iterations of the narrative elements which anchor the paintings. Each explores a subject that plays out an entanglement later in the collected narrative of the exhibition allowing moments of focus to surface briefly between the splendor and overbearance of the natural world.
Anthony Cudahy (b. 1989 Ft. Meyers, FL, US) completed an MFA at Hunter College, New York, NY (US) in 2020. He has had solo exhibitions with Hales Gallery, New York, NY (US) in 2021; Semiose Gallery, Paris (FR) in 2021 and 1969 Gallery, New York, NY (US) in 2018. He has been shown in various international group exhibitions and was included in GRIMM’s Equal Affections exhibition in Amsterdam (NL) in 2021.
His work can be found in collections of The Hort Family Collection, New York, NY (US), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (US), Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao (CN), and Les Arts au Mur Arthothèque de Pessac, Pessac (FR).