HUGO MCCLOUD

Hugo McCloud recontextualizes and reframes the perception of common objects and materials through a diverse practice that highlights process, social economics, and beauty. As a self-taught artist with a background in industrial design, he has made paintings with materials ranging from plastic bags, liquid tar, and roofing paper marked with elaborate floral patterns. These materials reflect his background as biracial and from a working-class family, while the content often suggests his family’s artistic leanings. While McCloud’s early work leaned towards abstraction, his later work has become more figurative, often depicting either workers carrying towering loads on their backs and pushing overfilled carts, or simple floral arrangements.

McCloud has created a unique technique that has become his primary working strategy—the manipulation of commercial single-use shopping bags into texturally rich swaths of color, creating complex and visually stunning forms. These paintings are composed entirely of primary colors by layering and melting the bags. Observing the lifecycle of the bags throughout an economy of goods and labor, McCloud is inspired by how this ubiquitous material passes through the hands of individuals at every level of society. His flower paintings, like traditional floral still-lives, with their unique forms and temporality speak to the passage of time and changing of seasons. Another body of work focuses on paintings of fruit cart umbrellas—ubiquitous in all neighborhoods throughout the city—that double as representations of both labor and hope. Using the non-biodegradable plastic to conjure natural forms, McCloud’s works also push the viewer to consider contradictions present in contemporary society relating to industrialization and the natural world.