You might not remember when the whole street art movement started, from when people stopped looking for art at contemporary art museums to searching for it in city streets all over the world. You might not remember… But Futura does. Because he was there. Because, after all, he was the genesis of all this.
FUTURA, A BIT OF HISTORY
It might be that, to this day, street art and urban art are used as a common currency. But, for something to become common currency, it means that few pioneers have had to exist before that… Futura is one of those pioneers and trying to do a brief historical overview of the importance of his work and heritage is almost impossible.
A quick overview of the start of Futura’s artistic biography can cause vertigo and fatigue. Seriously. After all, Leonard Hilton McGurr was one of the first artists to decorate New York’s underground with graffiti at the beginning of the ‘70s. The ‘80s inaugurated it in a big way, with a collective exhibition at the legendary Fun Gallery, without a doubt the birthplace of urban art created by Patti Astor and Bill Stelling. In that exhibition, Futura was among other artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambleton or Kenny Scharf, which makes for an extremely interesting display in which you can sense the place that, from the very beginning, corresponded to this artist in the contemporary art map.
By the way, at the time (and until very recently), Futura wasn’t called Futura, he was Futura 2000. We suppose that, with the turn of the century, McGurr decided to remove a tag line that sounded too demodé and which does no justice to his career full of truly historic moments. The artist painted live during the shows of The Clash’s 1981 European Tour, for example. And, just four years later, he was one of the most prominent names of the first urban art meeting in history, which was held in the French city of Bondy and which brought together such succulent names like Speedy Graphito, Miss Tic, Epsylon Point, Kim Prisu or Banlieue-Banlieue.
And, then, just before changing millennia, his second youth arrived. Suddenly, Futura was the talk of the town thanks to the fascinating work he was carrying out for the covers of different bands under the Mo’Wax record label in general and specifically for another icon of the last leg of the ‘90s: the Unkle band, which had never been a band but a megalomaniac delusion of producer James Lavelle. Those were other times, in which a cover was seen as something important. Just as important as graffiti in the ‘80s. Or like digital art nowadays.
Since then, however, McGurr has managed to stay on the crest of a wave that due to its intensity it never seems to end. Futura doesn’t only have a fashion brand, but he’s also one of the main names of design at an international level, on top of being one of the seminal artists of urban art. He’s able to alternate between a t-shirt capsule collection for Uniqlo and an exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Because that’s what the artist from the 21st-century looks like: a versatile artist whose rules were established, in great part, by Futura himself.
