MIKE CLOUD

Possessions curated by Zoé Whitley

Preview: October 7 – 8 Public Access: October 9 – 16 and simultaneously at the gallery, October 7 – 17

Mike Cloud solo project:

Mike Cloud is a painter who builds irregularly shaped canvases that wed theframe and painted surface into a woven whole through sculpturalstrategies. By combining his conceptual approach with a materialrichness and a sensual handling of wet-into-wet technique, Cloud revealsthe range of significations connected to shapes, surfaces and symbolsin an infinitely malleable, direct and forcefully abstract mode.

In his most recent exhibition, Tears in abstraction (Thomas Erben Gallery, fall 2019), Cloud uses abstraction to offer theviewer an aesthetic account of individuality, death and the empathicspace of communion in absence of the political mechanisms of personal,racial, cultural and gendered identification.

As to this project for Frieze London, Cloud wrote in a recent email to the gallery:

“This is a continuation of my investigation into abstract approaches toportraiture and the subject of bodily suffering in the victims ofchance, crime and the state.

Through shattered constructions, bold color and painterly surfaces, I attune the aesthetics of myexpressionistic painterly treatment to the particular key of collectiveconsciousness and mourning.

I feel this is an important project because the most radical challenge to the modernist conception of’personal’ or expressive art making is the contemporary conception of’identity’ where in all subjects are considered as primarily a set ofintersectional political coordinates larger than themselves. Likewisethe greatest provocation to the concept of Western liberal democracy isthe seaming impossibility of meeting the demands of the victims ofchance, crime and political injustice.”