PHILADELPHIA, PA.- Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of University of the Arts presents the first Philadelphia exhibition of paintings by Mike Cloud, widely known for his large-scale, layered and constructed paintings.

Cloud’s paintings complicate with layers of meaning. He constructs tiered stretchers, often in stellate forms, to which he applies objects such as children’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.

Born in 1974 in Chicago, Cloud received his BFA in 2001 from University of Illinois and his MFA from Yale University in 2003. He currently lives and works in Chicago.

Cloud’s work has been exhibited over 20 one-person and 40 group exhibits nationally and internationally including at Good Children Gallery, Los Angeles; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; White Columns, New York; Max Protetch, New York; Apexart, New York and the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovak Republic.

Cloud has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America and Art Review. He was featured in the Phaidon Press publication Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas. His awards include the inaugural Chiaro Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, an artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barry Schactman Prize in Painting from the Yale University School of Art as well as the Grace Holt Memorial Award in African American Issues from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Cloud has lectured extensively on contemporary theoretical art issues at Yale University; Kansas City Art Institute; the University of New Orleans; Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University; the Jewish Museum, New York; Cooper Union, New York; and Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

His work is in private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum, Lincoln Center, the Sheldon Memorial Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum in the Slovak Republic. Cloud is currently an associate professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is represented by Thomas Erben Gallery in New York.