Conversation, 2023, 208 pages, 11.42h x 8.27w inches
When New York artist Anthony Cudahy encounters the anonymous works in the collection of the Musée des beaux-arts de Dole, he engages in a conversation with them, in which sensitive relationships emerge that redefine our knowledge of the history of art as much as of the artist's own painting. As an extension, Martin Bethenod, Marc Donnadieu, Jenna Gribbon, Ian Lewandowski and Samuel Monier also devote themselves to the exquisite art of conversation with the artist.
The first monograph on Anthony Cudahy, the catalogue brings together a portfolio of some sixty recent paintings, completed by a special notebook reproducing the thirty or so unattributed works chosen by the painter from the collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Dole. Martin Bethenod and Jenna Gribbon provide the artist's response, while Marc Donnadieu explores the avenues of the work's heterotopia and Samuel Monier guides the reader through the reserves of the Dole museum. Finally, photographer Ian Lewandowski has created a portfolio in which the artist is captured in intimate moments of work.
From April to September 2023, the Musée des beaux-arts de Dole is presenting Anthony Cudahy's first exhibition in a French institution. On the occasion of this invitation, the artist has designed a specific device for creating a dialogue between his paintings and the museum's collections, without distinction of periods or styles. In relation to his recent paintings, whose repertoire - flowers, amorous attitudes, portraits - explores the registers of the romantic and tender, he draws works from the collections that echo them: idealized landscapes, naked bodies, violent scenes or still lifes. Building bridges across eras, the conversation that the artist engages in painting, from New York, with the Jura collections, is of the order of the sensitive. This dialogue reintegrates, in passing, works never or rarely taken out of the reserves, into a new regime of visibility.