Anthony Cudahy — Like Night Needs Morning — Lieu indépendant — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 17 → November 23, 2024

The artist’s interest for the archives that nourish his practice is the thread linking the works presented in the exhibition.

If we were able to glance in Anthony Cudahy’s studio in Brooklyn, we would see its walls covered with black-and-white images taken from art history books, hung alongside fragments of photographs of Renaissance paintings or images from his personal life. These include snapshots or portraits of his community of friends and artists, photographs from his uncle’s archive, fragments of motifs from medieval bestiaries or antique tapestries.

Anthony Cudahy’s work is rich in references to history and art history, yet the artist is also a dramatist of the ordinary. His works are an ode to intimacy, solitude, desire, eroticism, life and death. Mythical or transfigured flowers, faces, bodies, embraces emerge in his drawings and the subjects are frozen in bright, vibrant colors.

A new series of large-scale drawings is presented here for the first time. Colored pencils and acrylic washes plunge the scenes into a suspended, dreamlike dimension, where real life and myth, daydreaming and history, tenderness and intimacy merge. Like Night Needs Morning also evokes the notion of a cyclical time and the opposition between day and night, light and darkness. Midnight walker, Dawn walker — explorers of the dark or the dawn. We are immersed in a permanent oscillation between dawn and the depth of night, in a movement and duality that are also reflected in the exhibition’s scenography.

An exclusive video featuring images and recordings from the artist’s archive echoes the 65 editions — fanzines, publications, microeditions — produced by the artist and brought together for the first time. Queer iconography, archival images of New York’s gay community from the 1980s and photographs from his personal collection are among the sources that nourish Anthony Cudahy’s practice, where fiction and reality are in constant dialogue.

An original poster and a publication designed by the artist and published by Semiose Editions complete this exhibition project.