Futura 2000

Subways, the Navy and abstraction

Leonard Hilton McGurr was born in New York City in 1955 and began painting illegally on the subway in the early seventies, working alongside writers including ALI. He served four years in the United States Navy, travelling widely, and returned to a city where graffiti was on the point of crossing into the gallery system.

What set him apart was abstraction. While the primary focus of most writers was lettering and elaborate name tagging, he pushed spray paint towards something closer to gestural painting, with aerosol strokes so thin they read like the fine lines of an airbrush. That approach was unusual then and has since become one of the standard vocabularies of the form. He took the name Futura 2000 and later shortened it to Futura.

The Clash and the Fun Gallery

Two things carried him beyond the subway. The first was the Fun Gallery, where Patti Astor showed him in 1982 alongside Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambleton and Kenny Scharf. His work had already appeared in the survey New York / New Wave at PS1 in 1981.

The second was The Clash. He produced the sleeve for This Is Radio Clash, handwrote the sleeve notes and lyric sheet for Combat Rock, rapped on the track Overpowered by Funk, and toured with the band, spray painting backdrops live on stage while they performed. Almost all of those backdrops are gone. The one believed to survive, a large stylised tag on board acquired from Don Letts's production company, sold at Bonhams in London in 2011 for a high five figure sum in pounds and remains his best known object at auction.

Gallery shows followed quickly: Yvon Lambert in Paris in 1983, the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles in 1985, the Musee de Vire in France in 1989, and the museum survey Coming from the Subway at the Groninger Museum in 1992.

Graphic design, streetwear and the long return

The middle of his career was hard. He worked as a bike messenger and at a post office in Queens to support his son, having found it difficult to sustain a living as a gallery artist. James Lavelle revived the career by commissioning artwork for Mo' Wax releases with Ben Drury, which produced the imagery that came to define the Unkle project.

From there he built a second practice that is difficult to separate from the first. He worked with GFS, Subware and Project Dragon, then with Nike, Medicom Toy, Undercover, Supreme, Levi's and A Bathing Ape, and he runs his own label, Futura Laboratories, with a store in Fukuoka. His Pointman figure became one of the most recognisable characters in streetwear. He has designed a Hennessy bottle, a series of vehicles with BMW, and merchandise for the New York Mets, and he taught his method as an online masterclass.

The institutional record caught up over the past fifteen years. He was included in Art in the Streets at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2011, showed at the ICA in London in 2013, had a solo called Introspective at the Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris in 2014, appeared in The Bridges of Graffiti at the Venice Biennale in 2015, opened New Horizons at Library Street Collective in Detroit in 2016, and was given a retrospective, Breaking Out, at the UB Art Galleries in Buffalo in 2023.

His work is held by the Fonds Municipal d'Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris, the Musee de Vire and the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna. The print Community (White) catalogued here belongs to the run of editions through which most collectors now enter his market, and it made well above its high estimate in this saleroom.