Painterly atoms splitting. Doorways to the multiverse ajar. No rapid starting or finish. Perpetual movement. Gears turning, interlocking, levitating. A transcendental floor. Out and in of focus. Completely ephemeral. A cosmic sensibility. So, Futura 2000’s solo exhibition, The Mechanical Age, opens with two putting purple, white, and black sibling work, Sister and Brother, aerosol on primed canvas, which was executed in 2025.
Pairs of Pointmen, Futura 2000’s seminal characters, converge in a brand new sequence of collaged works on paper. Every of the twenty new works additionally features a banknote from a rustic that the artist has visited throughout his lifetime or dreamt himself to. The banknotes now seem as relics, long-lost tokens from a bodily capitalist age, the place tangible foreign money and commerce went hand in hand. Monetary postcards from Ukraine, Zaire, Denmark, Cuba, America, and plenty of different nations. Inside the work, silhouettes of gears float out and in of the compositions, interacting with currencies and abstracted figures, a perplexing sensation of lack of gravitation. The works have a transitional feeling, forsaking the concrete and drifting in direction of one thing else, much less stable, unsure, and spectral. The second of departure.
Two dynamic atom compositions on canvas, created with aerosol on primed canvas, Husband and Spouse, bounce with a buoyant vitality. The 2 work really feel concurrently interconnected and free, emphasising a sensation of neighborhood and cycle within the exhibition. We co-exist in an interlinked world the place trigger and impact turn into nonetheless extra obvious in {our relationships} with one another and the remainder of the planet.
Over the previous 5 many years, Futura 2000, born Leonard Hilton McGurr, in 1955, New York, NY, USA, has developed a celebrated and coveted iconic visible language. He established his distinct vocabulary whereas coming of age together with his Seventies downtown New York friends Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. With an outset in neo-expressionist portray, basic graffiti, punk, hip hop, and dance, Futura 2000 created his personal visible lexicon. An expressive and energetic language of fluid actions, robust gestures, zero gravitational strokes, summary cosmic constellations, transcendental compositions, and a extremely recognisable shape-shifting signature determine. Happily, the language of portray by no means rests; it transforms and evolves from caves to canvas to metropolis partitions and past, and neither does Futura 2000, who retains experimenting, refining, curiously collaborating, pushing, pulling, and making use of paint like nobody else. Futura 2000 had his first solo exhibition with V1 Gallery in 2005 when the gallery was nonetheless situated in Absalonsgade, we’re thrilled to welcome the pioneering artist again to Denmark, the place he took half in his first group exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Trendy Artwork in 1984. —Jesper Elg
