Anthony Cudahy, Double Spar

About

Double Spar coincides with Frieze London and follows on from Conversation, Cudahy's solo institutional debut at Musée des Beaux-Arts Dole, France, and precedes his first US museum solo at Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine.  

Cudahy is a painter whose tender scenes reveal the nuanced complexities of life. His work speaks to the legacy of figurative painting and portraiture, deftly combining historic references with contemporary life and human connection. Looking to allegorical paintings with multiple readings, motifs become a part of his visual lexicon, creating a world for stories. The exhibition across both spaces, combines large-scale canvases rich interplays and intimate moments. Accompanying the exhibition is a book of reference material, essays and an original written piece by Cudahy.   

The show takes its title, Double Spar, from an Icelandic sunstone which causes the sightline through the crystal to appear doubled. Interpreted in medieval texts as a celestial vision, the stone speaks to an early kind of magic, both symbolic and physical.  Cudahy explores this idea of doubling: subtle dual associations appear in companion paintings, as recurrent gestures and pairings of figures. Mirroring is used as compositional and narrative device to expand the material potential outside the space of the scenes. Repetitions of the same figure at different times of day within a painting evoke astral projections, and a meta exploration of time extends across both exhibition spaces through companion paintings.