Hugo McCloud | Burdened

Burdened, Hugo McCloud’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, features all new work created over that last nine months while McCloud quarantined at his studio in Mexico. Composed entirely of the simultaneously ubiquitous and overlooked industrial material: single use plastic bags, this new body of work address humanistic issues concerning the economics of labor, geopolitics, the environmental impact of the material he employs in his work and finding beauty in the everyday.

McCloud is well known for his abstract paintings which engage materials often omitted in fine art practices: tar paper, soldering material, acidic abrasives; things the artist refers to as “discarded, disregarded and devalued.” Continuing his process of utilizing the overlooked, the works in the three new series included in the exhibition are meticulously composed of hundreds, even thousands, of small cut-out pieces of varied hues of plastic--the “paint” that comprises his palette--collaged one by one on panel.

Through his process of recycling materials to create these works, McCloud addresses the economics of labor through plastic itself and how it is passed through the hands of individuals at every level of society. He questions how down-cycling applies to politics worldwide, to inequality, migration and the resources available to us.

Originally drawing inspiration from photographs of people he encountered during his travels, McCloud was required to re-tool and source images from the internet when COVID-19 related travel restrictions were put in place early last year.

One series of paintings focuses on workers performing their daily tasks. The subjects, their gazes concealed or averted, are engaged in labor critical to their survival, whether collecting refuse, transporting fruit and other goods, or recycling oil. McCloud states that the works in this exhibition are “about the idea of the person that is burdened in life trying to survive or trying to make ends meet or trying to do whatever they're doing. I think in some regards, everybody is burdened in their own way and has their own burdens in life.”

Having traveled to Morocco many times, McCloud became aware of the women locally referred to as “mules,” human porters who carry extraordinary loads of goods across the border on their backs, because they are only allowed to bring what they can carry. McCloud elaborates, “Understanding the border through maps and topography and images of these sacks, I collaged the imagery and abstracted the reality of the hardship these humans go through to bring it to light and open the dialog of humanitarianism through an alternative avenue.” For more information about the images that inspired McCloud, please visit narratively.com

McCloud refers to another series of more intimate, elegiac images of plants and flowers as his “quarantine drawings.” He notes that as the lockdown continued and we were all continually being bombarded with negative news and our movements were increasingly restricted, it was important for him to “find a moment in each day of something that was in a sense still beautiful and still light.”

Hugo McCloud has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Arts Club, London and Fondazione 107, in Turin, Italy. He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and The Drawing Center, New York. His work is in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Brooklyn Museum, the Mott Warsh Collection, The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, and the Pizzuti Collection. McCloud's work is currently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio.

In June of 2021 McCloud’s work will be the subject of a solo exhibition Hugo McCloud: from where i stand at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 

Hugo McCloud lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Tulum, Mexico. 

 Virtual Curator Talk: Hugo McCloud and Marshall N. Price, Curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Thursday, February 18, 2021, 3 PM EST
To register, click here

Hugo McCloud with Lyle Rexer: New Social Environment #233, The Brooklyn Rail, February 12, 2021                     

Hugo McCloud and Sean Kelly in conversation, January 28, 2021

"LVH Art in Conversation with Artist Hugo McCloud." LVH Art. February 27, 2021

Valentine, Victoria. "Hugo McCloud’s New Paintings are Made with Single-Use Plastic Bags: ‘This Material Could Be Used as Art, But Also as a Tool to Open Up Conversation’." Culture Type. February 26, 2021

Hahn, Jennifer. "Hugo McCloud’s artworks use plastic bags instead of paint." Dezeen. February 16, 2021

Aton, Francesca. "Hugo McCloud on Painting with Plastic." Art in America. February 3, 2021

Tauer, Kristen. "Hugo McCloud Paintings, Created From Plastic Bags, on View at Sean Kelly Gallery." WWD. January 27, 2021

Walsh, Brienne. "Hugo McCloud Uses Plastic Bags As Paint In A New Series Of Work." Forbes. January 22, 2021.

Fontaine, Pearl. “Hugo McCloud Paints with Single-Use Plastic in ‘Burdened’.” Whitewall. January 18, 2021.