Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts is pleased to present the first Philadelphia exhibition of paintings by Mike Cloud. Cloud is widely known for his large-scale, layered and constructed paintings.

Born in 1974 in Chicago, Illinois, Cloud attended University of Illinois (BFA 2001) and received his MFA from Yale University in 2003. He currently lives and works in Chicago. Cloud’s paintings complicate with layers of meaning. He constructs tiered stretchers, often in stellate forms, to which he applies objects such as child’s clothing. The canvases are stapled within the stretchers so that they are exposed as things, constructs, objectified not illusionistic, inverted, exposed, raw. The clothing supplies an understandable scale indexed to a small body. His texts and paint marks then are coded communication rituals. For Cloud, painting retains an allegorical function, it’s system is imbued with a history, a site (the wall), and an evolving lexicon of marks. There is an urgency to his exploration of new forms that mimics expressionism.