Talk Art

New Talk Art!!! For this VERY special episode we meet artist couple - photographer Ian Lewandowski and painter Anthony Cudahy to discuss how their individual art practices overlap through their life together and the idea of the 'muse'.

Ian Lewandowski (born 1990) is a photographer from Northwest Indiana. He’s exhibited photographs at School 33 Art Center (Baltimore), 1969 Gallery (New York), Skylab Gallery (Columbus), and Lamar Dodd School of Art (Athens). Ian has been published in Unseen, The Fader, American Chordata, and Capricious. In 2017 Dashwood Books published Vigil (RHYTHM) Vigil, a volume of his photographs alongside paintings and drawings by his partner Anthony Cudahy, which was in 2018 featured in theQueering Space group exhibition at Alfred University (Alfred). He holds an MFA from the State University of New York at Purchase. Ian’s work negotiates picture and body histories. He also archives the photo work of Kenny Gardner (1913-2002). He lives in Brooklyn. Ian Lewandowski’s first monograph, The Ice Palace is Gone, published by Magic Hour Press, is a collection of large format color photographs depicting queer identities and interiors within the context of community and care. Alluding to the nightclub on Fire Island, the Ice Palace is a space that represents the temporal and precarious nature of queer spaces, and the necessity for them to be constantly rebuilt and reimagined. In The Ice Palace is Gone, Lewandowski creates honest depictions of those he photographs, while presenting a potentiality for who they could be. Lewandowski’s portraits crystalize his subjects as characters within this seductive and surreal world, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. 

Anthony Cudahy (born 1989) is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY Anthony Cudahy (b.1989 Florida, USA) received a BFA from Pratt Institute, NY in 2011 and completed an MFA at Hunter College, NY in 2020. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Cudahy’s tender paintings reveal the nuanced complexities of life. In masterful compositions he creates a world for unspoken stories, intimate moments and romantic gesture. Personal and poetic, Cudahy’s figures coalesce with the atmosphere of their environments in fluid brushstrokes. At once dark and luminous, Cudahy’s paintings often have a phosphorescent quality to them, as though they are lit from within. For the artist, how the paint is handled has its own narrative potential – the thick textures, light airy space, patterning and delicate marks are all active in the story he is creating. Alongside painting, Cudahy makes incredibly detailed colored pencil drawings, in an all-consuming process of mark making. Unlike his paintings which transform throughout the making, the challenging medium calls for the compositions to be decided beforehand.

Follow @AnthonyCudahy and @ILewando on Instagram

Visit: https://anthonycudahy.com/ and https://ianlewandowski.com/