For the inaugural ART SG art fair (January 12 – 15, 2023) Eric Firestone Gallery in Booth #1D01 is pleased to present a selection of work by FUTURA2000. On-view will be new works by FUTURA2000, who is credited with introducing abstraction to subway painting —colliding the art historical tradition of Abstract Expressionism with the spontaneity and energy of urban art-making.

Among the most acclaimed graffiti artists who began his career painting subway cars in the late 1970s, FUTURA2000 has continued to evolve his innovative studio practice over the past four decades. As art historian and critic Carter Ratcliff writes, “The balance and counterbalance of composition has been with us for centuries. Having grasped—and mastered—this age-old way of organizing a painting, FUTURA made the transition from graffiti “writer” to artist. Not stopping there, he experimented with the “allover image”, a kind of pictorial structure seen first in paintings in the mid 1940’s…” and adds “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 work has been shown at The New Museum, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Groninger Museum, Groninger, Netherlands; and Yvon Lambert, Galerie De Noirmont. He was the subject of a 2019 exhibition at Urban Spree Gallery, Berlin, Germany and a monumental site-specific installation in 2020 at the Palais de Tokyo, Japan. His work was also included in the 2020 exhibition “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip Hop Generation,” at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA.

Futura’s work is on view currently in the exhibition “Somewhere Downtown,” at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

At ART SG, Eric Firestone Gallery will additionally present Joe Overstreet and Tseng Kwong Chi, whose work is also included in the UCCA exhibition. “Somewhere Downtown,” curated by Carlo McCormick and Peter Eleey, celebrates the creativity of Downtown New York City in the 1980s. 

Tseng Kwong Chi (b. 1950, Hong Kong; d. 1990, New York) was an important documentarian and denizen of the downtown 1980s New York club and art scene. During his brief but prolific 10-year career, he created vibrant color and black- and-white photographs of his contemporaries Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, McDermott and McGough, Kenny Scharf, Philip Taaffe, Madonna, Grace Jones, the B-52’s,and Fab Five Freddy, among others, a rich historical archive of the decade. He also had a trickster sense-of-humor, creating provocative images that contend with stereotypes of gender and Asian identity. His work is represented in numerous museum collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.