Hugo McCloud

Hugo McCloud currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and Tulum, Mexico. His early work used unconventional materials like roofing metal as a canvas, and was inspired by images the artist would find on Instagram. He has explained that when looking at these images, he is “drawn to [them] either because of the composition or colors or subject matter.” Using these materials, McCloud's more abstract works still connect to conversations about social class and cultural reflections of his experiences. His latest work was inspired by his experience moving to Mexico in 2018; utilizing single-use plastic bags, McCloud depicts scenes of workers and the homeless.

This piece is made on tar paper and resembles the qualities of a painterly work, when in reality it contains very little paint material. This piece is part of a series started in 2012 when McCloud was residing in New York.

McCloud moved to New York in 2009 and moved to Mexico in 2020 to live between Mexico and the United States. His work with the plastic bags started after he saw a show in Mumbai in 2015 where they had stacks of colorful plastic bags; after experiencing that, he decided to collect plastic bags from the many places he travelled to, experimenting with the possibilities plastic can be used in art.

Hugo McCloud (born 1980) is an American visual artist born in Palo Alto, California. He is inspired by urban landscapes and using unconventional, mostly industrial and discarded, materials to create his pieces, such as: black tar, bitumen, aluminum sheeting, oxidized steel plates, and plastic bags. He fuses these materials with conventional pigment and woodblock printing techniques. McCloud gets his references from photographs of people in developing countries. Using these photographs his work relates on topics like economy of labor, geopolitics, and environmental issues. His works states what reversing the negative impact of society's carbon footprint could look like.