Thomas Erben Gallery presents Mike Cloud’s Suitcase Portraits, his ninth exhibition with the gallery. It coincides with his solo shows at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, through early 2027.
The new works are foldable suitcase-form paintings with store-bought handles, ranging from 24 to 60 inches. They contain abstract, unidentified portraits of body parts and viscera. Cloud examines painting’s relation to death, suffering, victimhood, and commodification. The works are described as speculative portraitures of an anonymous global crime wave, with titles referencing places such as Nigeria, Bangladesh, and France. Forensic traces including jewelry, flags, and tattoos appear.
Cloud is a Chicago-based artist and Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received his MFA from Yale in 2003.
Mike Cloud: Suitcase Portraits / Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. September 17, 2026.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Thomas Erben is proud to present Mike Cloud’s Suitcase Portraits, the artist’s ninth exhibition with the gallery (solo presentations at The Independent, Art Basel Miami Beach and Frieze London included). This confounding group of new works goes on view coinciding with Cloud’s solo exhibitions Hammer Projects: Mike Cloud at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Mike Cloud: Worldless Obstruction at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (until January and February 2027, respectively).
Investing the macabre with painterly care and referring to crime and commodification within a quasi-devotional format, in Suitcase Portraits, Cloud continues to delve into the complexities of human suffering, victimhood and the possibility of creating a space for empathic encounter.
Removed is Cloud’s familiar repertoire of shaped canvases and inscribed URL references to persons or events. The artist’s signature use of structural stretcher bars—brought to the surface of his paintings—is reconfigured into a series of suitcases. Equipped with store-bought handles, the paintings range from 60 x 60 to 24 x 24 (inches, open), fold in half and are placed open or closed in any direction on the wall or freestanding on the floor. Each painting contains an abstract, unidentified portrait.
What continues in this body of new work is Cloud’s interest in the relationship between painting and death, invoked here by the arrangement of renderings of human parts found in suitcases around the world with titles referring to Nigeria, Bangladesh or France. Rather than being tied to specific, newsworthy events, these paintings are “speculative portraitures of an anonymous global crime wave”. The violence of bodily dissection, arrangement and concealment is reflected in the segmented, closeable surfaces each containing loose renderings—cartoonish near-abstractions of organs, rips, bones or other viscera.
Cloud adds forensic traces: jewelry, flags, faded tattoos, which hint at a third subject intruding upon the intimacy of the viewer’s experience, circling us back to the social conditions of our contemporary environment. This mise-en-scène evokes the presentation of relics whereas the handles refer to their transportation and commercialization customary in medieval times or to the contemporary trade in organs. While reflecting upon these harsh social and bodily realities, Cloud’s seemingly carefree—or “loving”, in the artist’s own words—application of paint and handling of materials results in works of great material, conceptual and visual significance.
Mike Cloud is a Chicago-based artist whose work examines the conditions of painting in its contemporary life among countless reproductions, symbols and descriptions. After studying at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Cloud earned his MFA from Yale in 2003. His work has been extensively shown, at venues such as MoMA P.S.1, Marianne Boesky Gallery, White Columns, Max Protetch, Apexart, and has been included in group exhibitions, such as Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Honor Fraser Gallery. In addition to numerous reviews, his work was part of Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas, Phaidon Press (2009). He has been awarded the inaugural Chiaro Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, CA; a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and residencies at the Meulensteen Art Centre in the Netherlands as well as the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in New York. Cloud is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
