Futura 2000

Leonard Hilton McGurr, known as Futura 2000, was born in 1955 in New York and began painting New York subway trains in the early 1970s, still a teenager.

After serving in the US Navy between 1974 and 1978, he painted “Break” in 1980, a whole train car covered in abstract shapes and colours with no lettering at all, a break from graffiti’s traditional lettering. He exhibited from the early 1980s at the Fun Gallery alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, painted stage backdrops and record sleeves for The Clash, and went on to collaborate with Nike, Supreme and Stüssy. His work has entered the collections of the New Museum and MOCA Los Angeles, and was the subject of a retrospective at the Bronx Museum.

Atomic shapes

Futura 2000 broke early with the figurative lettering of New York graffiti to develop an abstract vocabulary of fine lines, clouds of colour and shapes he himself called “atomic,” as if in perpetual motion. This aesthetic, drawing on imagery from space and science fiction, opened the way for what critics now call post-graffiti, a bridge between street art and contemporary gallery art from the 1980s onward.