Publisher: Eric Firestone Press
Title: FUTURA2000 / TARPESTRIES
Contributors: ZEPHYR
Publication Date: January 2023
Binding: Softcover
Dimensions: 10 x 8 in
Pages: 64
Retail: $50
AVAILABLE BELOW
Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce FUTURA2000 / TARPESTRIES. Opening on August 6, 2022, the exhibition unveils a fresh body of work that the artist made this year.
Presented across Eric Firestone Gallery’s locations in East Hampton will be more than twenty unstretched paintings that are highly expressive and richly layered. These compositions are filled with precisely rendered lines and symbols, saturated mists of color, and gestural brushstrokes. They will be juxtaposed with a monumental bronze sculpture of “39 Meg": a quasi-alien, quasi-robot figure that FUTURA2000 has repeatedly depicted.
On view through September 18, 2022 in the gallery’s flagship building at 4 Newtown Lane as well as its recently opened warehouse space called The Garage at 62 Newtown Lane, this is FUTURA2000’s second solo exhibition with Eric Firestone Gallery, who represents the artist. It follows Futura Akari, a 2020–21 solo show at the Noguchi Museum, Queens, NY, as well as Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip Hop Generation, a 2020–21 survey including the artist at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.
Among the most acclaimed graffiti artists who began his career painting subway cars in the late 1970s, FUTURA2000 is credited with introducing abstract painting to the street art genre—colliding the art historical tradition of Abstract Expressionism with the spontaneity and energy of urban art-making. As art historian and critic Carter Ratcliff writes, “[FUTURA2000’s] painterly gestures are the traces of powerful actions, yet his imagery feels more exuberant than gladiatorial. With a confidence he has always been able to count on, he turns the daunting blankness of the canvas into an occasion for an unexpected response.”
FUTURA2000’s most recent paintings return to his graffiti roots, with a progressive use of spray paint and a monumental scale not seen since his early days working in situ. Using Eric Firestone Gallery’s spaces in New York City and East Hampton as his studio, FUTURA2000 employed his trademark spray technique to create layers of paint on manipulated industrial tarps with grommets, producing a series of unstretched works.
Varying in scale from seven to twenty-five feet, these TARPESTRIES are exhibited unframed in the same manner as traditional tapestries. Visitors will be surrounded by and immersed in these monumental works. Speaking with The New York Times about his first exhibition in 2020 at Eric Firestone Gallery, FUTURA2000 remarked on the physical experience of his recent output: “People are quite familiar with my stuff, but no one gets to actually see it, so I’m really happy people get to look at the work, without swiping, and zooming and enlarging with your two fingers. People’s perceptions immediately change. You’re actually in it.”