Mike Cloud

Untitled (Beheading)

In his series Hanging and Beheading Paintings Mike Cloud speaks to the suffering of a series of named (and occasionally unnamed) individuals, addressing their trauma within the language of abstraction. They offer the viewer an aesthetic account of individuality, death, and the empathic space of communion in absence via avant-garde portraiture, unbound by the rules of anatomy or even representation, but instead by purely expressive compositional and aesthetic goals.

Untitled (Beheading) embraces the individual subjectivities of notable and mundane contemporaries — from pop stars to serial killers — in cryptic ways, connected only by the physical circumstances of their deaths. The key question Cloud asks is: What type of knowledge does a viewer need in order to connect with a particular individual’s worth, suffering and reality?

His impetus for making these new works was the controversy surrounding Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting Open Casket. Untitled (Beheading) is an especially enigmatic piece; the viewer does not know the identity of the painting’s “subject” and there is a head-shaped hole near its center. Deconstructed, kinetic, and strange, these “portraits” speak to the unsettling and insecure nature of monumentalizing any sort of other.