at Sean Kelly TEFAF New York 2025, Stand 330
Hugo McCloud - TEFAF
Hugo McCloud
REPLACE WITH ART DETAIL
Hugo McCloud’s still-life flower series began as a meditative practice to mark the passage of time through daily acts of creation.
What began as a quiet quarantine ritual evolved into a powerful body of work that explores beauty, fragility, and environmental consciousness. Each composition is meticulously crafted from pieces of single-use plastic, materials collected from everyday packaging and waste, which are heated, layered, and pressed onto canvas. This unconventional process yields a viscous, painterly surface that mimics the flow and luminosity of oil paint while preserving the texture and coloration of the plastic.
Referencing the tradition of floral still-life painting, McCloud reimagines the genre through a contemporary lens, infusing it with both serenity and tension. The softness of each bloom—petals unfurling in delicate gradients, leaves arching with weightlessness—is rendered in a medium that is anything but ephemeral. In this contrast between subject and material, McCloud creates a visual and conceptual friction: the organic beauty of flora is frozen in synthetic permanence, inviting contemplation on consumption, waste, and resilience.
Each work is titled after the date of its creation, forming an intimate archive that chronicles the artist’s lived experience, one day and one flower at a time. These quiet, luminous portraits offer a pause—a suspended moment of reflection—in which viewers are invited to consider not only the fleeting beauty of nature but also the enduring consequences of human impact on the environment.
Installation view of Hugo McCloud: from where i stand, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, June 7, 2021 to January 2, 2022, Photo: Jason Mandella.
Stylist/Creative director: Rebekka Fellah
Photographer: Enrique Leyva
Born in Palo Alto California in 1980, Hugo McCloud is one of the most prolific artists working today. In a career that has now spanned more than fifteen years, McCloud’s work has quickly evolved through a process of restless experimentation, bringing inventiveness and fearlessness to the act of making. McCloud is engaged in an ongoing quest to elevate and master diverse methodologies, and the array of subjects his work addresses. An abiding, unifying theme is his preoccupation with finding beauty in the everyday.
Self-taught with a background in industrial design, McCloud’s practice is unrestricted by classical, academic tenets. He has gravitated toward materials that could be considered abject, including roofing materials, solder, and single-use plastic bags. Drawing inspiration from the rawness of the urban landscape, McCloud creates rich, large-scale abstract paintings by fusing unconventional industrial materials with traditional pigment and woodblock printing techniques. McCloud’s recent figurative work touches on notions of class, particularly through his use of plastic bags. His investigation into plastic began while traveling in India and seeing multi-color polypropylene plastic sacks everywhere. Observing the downcycle of these bags from their creation, to the companies that purchased them for the distribution of products, to the trash pickers in Dharavi slums, McCloud saw how this ubiquitous material passed through the hands of individuals at every level of society.
Responding to this material, McCloud developed a unique working process by which pieces of the variously hued plastics are collaged together, sometimes using thousands of pieces to create a single composition. At the level of their material and subject matter, these representational works address issues concerning the economics of labor, geopolitics and the environmental impact of plastic. In them, McCloud continues his practice of incorporating industrial materials into his work, using plastic as a tool to better understand our similarities and differences as a human race; to connect to our environment; and to contribute to reversing the negative impact of our carbon footprint.
McCloud has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, The Arts Club, London and Fondazione 107, in Turin, Italy. He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia, 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, and The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection.
Hugo McCloud lives and works in Los Angeles, California.