Anthony Cudahy @ GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam - a pearl caught between my teeth

Anthony Cudahy

a pearl caught between my teeth

GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam

29 October - 22 December 2022

ANTHONY CUDAHY

Eveningdawn (Reverse Pareidoliac Figure), 2022

© Anthony Cudahy, courtesy GRIMM

ANTHONY CUDAHY

loop (twilight), 2022

© Anthony Cudahy, courtesy GRIMM

GRIMM presents a pearl caught between my teeth, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by ANTHONY CUDAHY, on view at its Amsterdam gallery. This is 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, Anthony 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. Anthony 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 Flowers, Duh. In these works, Anthony 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, Paul 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.

ANTHONY CUDAHY

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).

A book with a new essay by Ricardo Montez was published on the occasion of the exhibition.

GRIMM

Keizersgracht 241 - 1016 EA, Amsterdam

www.grimmgallery.com

Linus Bill + Adrien Horni @ Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam - Midlife Painting

Linus Bill + Adrien Horni 

Midlife Painting 

Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam 

May 11 – June 18, 2022 

Linus Bill + Adrien Horni’s Studio

Photo courtesy of Ellen de Bruijne Projects

There is always more than meets the eye in the work of the artist duo LINUS BILL + ADRIEN HORNI (both b. 1982, CH). What is seemingly a conventionally looking abstract painting bears extensive processes of transformation, revaluation, and experimentation that subvert painting itself. Despite their appearance, it could be argued that their works resemble paintings, yet they are not. Rather, they are images in perpetual modification which, among different processes, have been painted on. As a matter of fact, Linus Bill + Adrien Horni do not consider themselves painters: Bill studied photography, while Horni is trained a graphic designer. Nonetheless, they chose painting as their medium since they first started working together in 2011. In their continuous quest to repurpose and expand their work, Midlife Painting is the result of an intuitive revaluation of existing images in which the circumstance of failure leads to success.

For this solo presentation, the artists are presenting a series of “paintings” that were put aside in their studio throughout the years for not being convincing enough but nevertheless having material value. Recently, the artists turned back to those works with a desire to revise them in order to achieve better versions. Not working for an actual exhibition gave them the freedom of not needing a result. No need to succeed was very liberating: they would work outside, in front of the studio, on the floor, putting them aside to dry and look at them another day and decide whether or not to keep working on them. By interfering in try-outs and rejected works digitally and materially, their artistic practice is in constant motion and revision. To repeat, to alter, to modify, to layer, to transfer: a shifting interaction that destabilises romantic notions of painting and responds to a society where reality is pictorially altered at all times.

Linus Bill + Adrien Horni’s practice is liberated from technical burdens and schematic behaviours. They work in a rather visceral way, without a clear result in mind. Laying on their studio floor, the works present themselves as canvases ready to be altered throughout an indefinite stretch of time. There is no rush, precision and satisfaction do not come hastened, just like an artistic practice as a duo requires a suiting pace for conversation, (dis)agreement, and cross-pollination. That is not to say their practice is left to randomness. In reality, the presence of chance in their work is the result of a conscientious approach to replicate how in the digital world images are replicated, appropriated, deformed, and repurposed.

Interested in stripping bare the artistic and its traditional notions of originality, genius, and uniqueness, they create by multiplying images, in a most digitally common action of copy/paste, to afterwards merge them layer upon layer. Avoiding the art world’s diligent formula for creation - documentation - distribution, the artists approach their own process as their commissions to efficiently reproduce their own piece. The process of choosing and (re)making a painting requires a formula of action and reaction, of tossing the digital image to one another, of swapping works which to work on, to ultimately amalgamate all the interventions into a final result. Yet the work keeps on living, ready to be given another look, to be transformed yet again.

Both born in 1982, one in Geneva (CH) and the other in Jegenstorf (CH), Adrien Horni and Linus Bill live and work in Biel, Switzerland. Linus Bill + Adrien Horni were the winners of the Swiss Art Award in 2013. Recent presentations of their work include La fine ligne. Kunsthalle Saint Gallen, Saint Gallen, CH (2020), Un été indien. FRAC Normandie-Caen, Caen, FR (2020), Cantonale Berne Jura. La Nef, Le Noirmont, CH (2019), Linus Bill + Adrien Horni. La Salle de Bains, Lyon, FR (2018), Das Glied. ACRUSH, Zurich, CH (2018).

ELLEN DE BRUIJNE PROJECTS

Singel 372, 1016 AH, Amsterdam

www.edbprojects.com