Anthony Cudahy


Solo

ceaseless arranger, GRIMM, Amsterdam, 2025

Fool’s errand / Fool’s gold, GRIMM and Hales Gallery, New York, NY, 2024

Double Spar, Hales Gallery and GRIMM, London 2023

A pearl caught between my teeth, GRIMM, Amsterdam, 2022

Coral Room, Hales Gallery, New York, NY, 2021

The Moon Sets A Knife, Semiose, Paris, 2021

Burn Across The Breeze, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY, 2021

Flames, Semiose, Paris, 2020


Museum

Spinneret, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME, 2024

Spinneret, The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX, 2024

Like Night Needs Morning, CAP Centre d'art de Saint-Fons, 2024

Conversation, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, Dole, 2023


Two-Person

It Was Dark in His Arms, with Ian Lewandowski, Deli Gallery, New York, NY, 2021


Group


Fairs


******


Printed Matter


Bibliography


Contact

ceaseless arranger, GRIMM, Amsterdam
August 29 - October 18, 2025

“The empty hand reaches toward the hose or rope. A snaking thing. A line. Three men—hunched or lying; touching, all of them—pass it to a standing fourth. Or take it from him. Does his hand reach, or would to impose any narrative, any intention, be projection? The right wall appears like holographic graffiti, and, beyond it, the image splits, the painting becomes an asymmetrical diptych: a bent arm, disappearing into sketchy lavender sheets, props up an unseen head.

Did I harm? Did I heal? Anthony Cudahy’s painting’s title asks.

The scientist Nicolas Andry, who coined the term “orthopedia” in 1741, proposed a sapling bound to a board as the field’s symbol, like the one sprouting in The inability to know another (Paul and bound tree). He was trying to help children right themselves, and he chose his area of study’s first Greek root, ortho, he wrote, since it “signifies straight, free from deformity.” On the one hand: the desire to correct, to discipline (Foucault did put Andry’s drawing, unremarked upon, in his book), or to nurture, maybe. On the other: the desire—or need—to vanish, to recede from straightening ropes and demarcating lines, to become a wash of color, to open a door to nowhere known.

If a portrait gets closer to anything, it’s unknowing. To try to find and fix the meaning behind any gesture or gaze would be misguided. Human yet architectonic, the arching arm could suggest an affordance unseen, like a knob or dial, something to open or change. Or it might suggest a wish to give or take. A gesture traces the empty air of narrative it can’t quite tell—like a Guston-like kettle, beside a man gazing at his own reflection, anticipates but does not generate a sound.

Borders dissolve, boundaries blur, a million portraits of a friend or lover only reveal more unknown wonders. Might this be true of the self, too? Painting the self in the studio in an implied Droste effect, the Solitary Arranger reaches toward the time when all will be just so—categorized and known, in its place.

The work is never done. As the saying goes: Idle hands…

The devil’s finger extends. His is one of the few hands shown in full. He’s an inky smudge. The Devil Points, indicating—or demanding?—that we should look, should see, should pay attention to something beyond the paper’s edge.

He floats upon a defined schema of arches and recessions which recall the spatial unreasoning of the altarpieces of Duccio or the tempera panels of Lorenzetti, who in the fourteenth century painted the active hands of Saint Nicholas, the active hands which raise the dead, toss coins, convince mariners to share their grains.

One story of Saint Nicholas tells of his felling a cypress. (Twisted? Gnarled? Salubriously erect? Who knows.) A demon inhabited this tree, and those who tried to cut it down had been killed. Nicholas exorcises the demon by slaying the tree with his bare hands. It would be ahistorical to call this a flipped version of an analogy common in medieval English poetry wherein foresters’ saws were depicted, what with their teeth, not only to gnaw but speak. Tools, to have value, it was thought, must be extensions of the body itself.

The Solitary Arranger might be reaching his brush to dip or dry it; again, the hand’s out of frame. The solitary arranger creates architectures which cast no shadows, flocks of birds, marriage quilts, floral visions of apocalyptic demise, and then, The Lovers (Triumph of Death): Each stepped part of a plane darkens to gold. Its selective third dimension luminesces a Sienese orangey rose. Bells and flames and abyss beyond. But, beside the guitar, its string broken in impossible angles, behind the book of looping patterns, the lovers sit. They are dressed. Their eyes meet, their wrists bend, interlace. Their hands are unseen but not off frame: they disappear into a crook of an elbow, an unbuttoned shirt. Time or body, landscape or image, pattern or person, present or past—loops and repetitions unstick. Pointing, reaching, grasping, arranging—hands move beyond boundaries or beyond the self to evoke a future as-of-yet decided or known, to create a connection, or merely to indicate something, or somewhere, else.”

Written by Drew Zeiba, August 2025

Photography GC Photography and Benjamin van der Veen

©2025