A pearl caught between my teeth, GRIMM, Amsterdam
October 29 - December 22, 2022


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.

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. 

The exhibition takes its title from a line in a poem by Paul Legault, titled Ok. 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.

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.

Photography by Lance Brewer and installation by LNDW Studio

Fear painting, 2022
Oil on linen
72 x 72 in
Eveningdawn (Reverse Pareidoliac Figure), 2022
Oil on linen
60 x 96 in
Broken Shells (narcissus loop), 2022
Oil on linen
60 x 48 in
Lattice (two apart), 2022
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 60 in
loop (twilight), 2022
Oil on linen
120 x 30 in
Broken Butterflies, 2022
Acrylic and oil on canvas
60 x 60 in
Lily and mirror with Apocalypse Tapestry, 2022
Oil on linen
72 x 72 in
Self-portrait in mirror with blade, flowers, stone, and Pompeian fruit, 2022
Oil on linen
24 x 18 in
Mother asleep, 2022
Oil on linen
18 x 24 in
Nightbloom, 2022
Oil on linen
24 x 18 in
Dissolved figure, 2022
Color pencil on paper
13 1/4 x 10 1/2 in
Entryway, 2022
Color pencil on paper
13 1/4 x 10 1/2 in
Lily doubled, 2022
Color pencil on paper
13 1/4 x 10 1/2 in
Moth half, 2022
Color pencil on paper
13 1/4 x 10 1/2 in
Reader ii, 2022
Color pencil on paper
13 1/4 x 10 1/2 in
Seneca sleeping, 2022
Color pencil on paper
13 1/4 x 10 1/2 in
Stray, 2022
Color pencil on paper
13 1/4 x 10 1/2 in
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