Anthony Cudahy - bad news delivered (the veil), 2025

The painting does not announce itself. A bearded man, his face turned
slightly away, stands in a pink-walled interior holding a phone — a gesture so
quotidian it would be invisible in life, yet here it is weighted with something
unspoken, a mood the painting refuses to name. On the table before him, two
vases of flowers: sunflowers slumping open, white lilies still pursed. A woven
stool. A discarded sock on the floor, a pair of clogs kicked off by the door.
In a mirror to the left, his reflection looks back, absorbed in the same small
screen, caught in a loop of private attention. On the wall, a framed landscape
painting, a picture within a picture, layers of image folding into one another.
The light is warm and peculiar — it falls like late afternoon, like the hour
when things are ending without quite having said so.

Anthony Cudahy calls this work bad news delivered (the veil). The title
is the painting's best kept secret: it tells you everything and nothing.
Something has happened, or is about to. The phone is both the instrument and
the veil — the medium through which contemporary life delivers its weight while
also screening us from it. What the man has read, or is reading, or is about to
read, remains entirely withheld. What Cudahy gives us instead is atmosphere:
the quality of a room just before or just after a moment that cannot be undone.

The painting belongs to metronome yawned, Cudahy’s current
exhibition at the Esker Foundation in Calgary — a show that meditates, as the
institution’s own text observes, on the slipperiness of time: how it is felt
compared to how it is ordered, how specific instances of mundanity can
unexpectedly and irreversibly punctuate the cadence of a life. This is Cudahy’s
great subject. He paints the moments that lodge in the body — not the announced
events, the milestones and ruptures, but the quieter ones, the ones that take
place in rooms while someone is looking at a phone, or watching flowers, or
staring into a mirror.

His colour palette is the first thing that arrests you, and it is
extraordinary — equal measures abundant, exuberant, acerbic, and romantic. In
this painting, dusty pinks and muted roses run into sage greens and earthy
ochres; the tiled floor reads dark red. The sunflowers introduce an unlikely
cadmium note. The colour is not naturalistic — it is tuned, calibrated to an
emotional register that sits somewhere between warmth and apprehension. Cudahy
has said that there are entire worlds in subtle saturation or value shifts.
This painting is proof of that proposition.

What distinguishes Cudahy from painters who merely render the
contemporary is his use of the room as psychological space. The interior here
is not backdrop but protagonist — a container for feeling, a skin that takes on
the mood of whoever inhabits it. The mirror is not decorative: it doubles the
figure, creates a circuit of self-observation, places the man at one remove
from himself just as the phone does, just as the veil does. The flowers on the
table occupy a different temporality — they are living and dying, indifferent
to whatever the phone contains. The painting holds all of this simultaneously,
without hierarchy or resolution, in the manner of something witnessed rather
than constructed.

Cudahy’s references are wide and worn lightly: queer archives, art
history, mythology, print ephemera, even fragments from his own previous
paintings. His open-ended narratives, as the Esker notes, gesture to the
gradual accumulation of meaning within the flotsam of our own lives — a
description that fits this work with particular precision. The painting is a
flotsam painting: a sock, a pair of clogs, some flowers, a phone, a man in a
pink room who may or may not have just received news that will change something.
That is all. And it is more than enough.

The Case for Acquiring Bad news delivered (the veil)
for the Black Square Collection

The case for this work rests on a convergence that is increasingly rare
in the contemporary market: a painting of genuine formal and emotional
intelligence, made by an artist whose institutional trajectory is accelerating
across multiple geographies simultaneously, acquired at a moment when the
collection can still move ahead of the broader market.

Cudahy (b. 1989, Fort Myers, FL) received his MFA from Hunter College,
New York in 2020 and has since built one of the most coherent and critically
supported practices among painters of his generation working in the figurative
tradition. His subject is queer intimacy and everyday tenderness — but his
method is formal sophistication: complex, original colour architecture;
psychologically loaded spatial construction; a narrative elusiveness that
invites extended looking. These are durable qualities. They do not depend on
trend.

The institutional validation behind his work is substantial and broad.
His solo exhibition Spinneret debuted at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in
2024 and travelled to the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, accompanied by
a dedicated publication. His first solo museum exhibition, Conversation, was
held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, France, in 2023. He has shown in
group exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art, the ICA Miami, PACE Hong Kong,
the FLAG Art Foundation, and the Courtauld Gallery in London — a geography of
institutional engagement that spans North America, Europe, and Asia.

His collection presence is equally impressive for an artist at his stage.
Works are held by the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Kunstmuseum The Hague, the
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the Dallas Museum of Art, the ICA
Miami, the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, and the Speed Art Museum, among others.
This is a collection profile that most painters spend careers building toward.
Cudahy has assembled it by his mid-thirties.

He is represented jointly by Hales Gallery — ranked #108 globally on
Artfacts, with locations in London and New York — and GRIMM, ranked #170
globally, with spaces in Amsterdam, London, and New York. Both galleries are
known for long-term artist development and serious institutional placement. His
Artfacts global ranking stands at 3,683 with an annual growth rate of nearly
10%, and his trajectory on the ranking chart shows a steep upward curve
sustained consistently since 2018 — the hallmark of genuine market momentum
rather than a spike.

The current exhibition at the Esker Foundation — metronome yawned, on
view from 24 January to 26 April 2026 — marks his first major institutional
presentation in Canada and extends a pattern of geographical expansion that has
characterised his career over the past three years. bad news delivered (the
veil) is a 2025 work, made at the height of his current exhibition cycle. It is
recent, it is significant, and it is precisely the kind of painting that
anchors a collection.

The work itself is, finally, the argument. It is a painting that rewards
sustained looking — one of those rare objects in which the mood deepens rather
than exhausts itself on acquaintance. Its emotional territory is universal: the
private weight of ordinary moments, the way that rooms hold the atmosphere of
what happens in them. For Black Square, which collects with both intellectual
seriousness and an eye to long-term value, this is exactly the kind of
acquisition that compounds in meaning as the collection develops. Cudahy’s
practice will be remembered. This is a good time to be part of it.