Anthony Cudahy at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole

The New York artist has opted to engage in a dialogue between his own paintings and those from the museum’s collections in response to this call. He has gathered about twenty of his most recent works, whose repertoire—flowers, expressions of love and intimacy, or portraits—explores the registers of the romantic, tender, and intimate. He has paired them with selected oeuvres from the museum archives in order to create resonance: idealized landscapes, nudes, scenes of violence, and still lifes, paintings that are generally narrative in nature, with no preference for period or style. Cudahy picked nameless or unattributed works out of humility in the presence of “great painting” and prominent signatures, as well as his preference for forgotten or lesser-known painters. The artist’s artistic conversation between New York and the Jura bridges centuries while paying evidence to a remarkable sensibility. Simultaneously, this interaction reintegrates works that have been rarely or never taken out of storage into a new regime of visibility.

Born in Florida in 1989, Anthony Cudahy lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Hunter College in 2020. He has enjoyed numerous exhibitions in the USA and UK, notably at the 1969 Gallery (New York), the Deli Gallery (New York) and Farewell Books (Austin, Texas). His works have been included in group shows at the Perrotin Gallery (New York), Hales (New York) and the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (Georgia, USA), amongst others. From January through March 2023, he curated an exhibition of ten American artists entitled The Minotaur’s Daydream for the gallery Semiose (Paris, France) which represents him.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole has established itself as a prominent reference in painting over the years. Its collections of French, Italian, and Nordic paintings from the 16th to the 19th centuries were supplemented at the end of the twentieth century by works from the 1960s and 1970s Figuration Narrative movement (Monory, Télémaque, Erro, Fromanger, Aillaud, Rancillac, Cueco, and others) and Nouveau Réalisme (César, Arman, Spoerri, and others). The museum’s collection is currently being built along two primary axes: image and narrative on the one hand, and art and society on the other (Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, Nina Childress, Morgane Tschiember…). In addition to its permanent displays of historic and contemporary art, the museum has presented important exhibitions featuring artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Peter Saul, Yan Pei Ming, and Steve Gianakos throughout its existence.