Eighteen is pleased to present
The Mechanical Age
A solo exhibition by Futura 2000
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY APRIL 4. 2025. TIME: 16.00 - 21.00
EXHIBITION PERIOD: APRIL 5. – MAY 24. 2025.
Painterly atoms splitting. Doors to the multiverse ajar. No immediate beginning or end. Perpetual motion. Gears turning, interlocking, levitating. A transcendental surface. In and out of focus. Permanently ephemeral. A cosmic sensibility. So, Futura 2000’s solo exhibition, The Mechanical Age, opens with two striking red, white, and black sibling paintings, Sister and Brother, aerosol on primed canvas, which was executed in 2025.
Pairs of Pointmen, Futura 2000’s seminal characters, converge in a new series of collaged works on paper. Each of the twenty new works also includes a banknote from a country that the artist has visited during his lifetime or dreamt himself to. The banknotes now appear as relics, long-lost tokens from a physical capitalist age, where tangible currency and commerce went hand in hand. Financial postcards from Ukraine, Zaire, Denmark, Cuba, America, and many other nations. Within the paintings, silhouettes of gears float in and out of the compositions, interacting with currencies and abstracted figures, a perplexing sensation of loss of gravitation. The works have a transitional feeling, leaving behind the concrete and drifting towards something else, less solid, uncertain, and spectral. The moment of departure.
Two dynamic atom compositions on canvas, created with aerosol on primed canvas, Husband and Wife, bounce with a buoyant energy. The two paintings feel simultaneously interconnected and free, emphasising a sensation of community and cycle in the exhibition. We co-exist in an interlinked world where cause and effect become still more apparent in our relationships with each other and the rest of the planet.
Over the past five decades, Futura 2000, born Leonard Hilton McGurr, in 1955, New York, NY, USA, has developed a celebrated and coveted iconic visual language. He established his distinct vocabulary while coming of age with his 1970s downtown New York peers Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. With an outset in neo-expressionist painting, classic graffiti, punk, hip hop, and dance, Futura 2000 created his own visual lexicon. An expressive and energetic language of fluid movements, strong gestures, zero gravitational strokes, abstract cosmic constellations, transcendental compositions, and a highly recognisable shape-shifting signature figure. Fortunately, the language of painting never rests; it transforms and evolves from caves to canvas to city walls and beyond, and neither does Futura 2000, who keeps experimenting, refining, curiously collaborating, pushing, pulling, and applying paint like no one else. Futura 2000 had his first solo exhibition with V1 Gallery in 2005 when the gallery was still located in Absalonsgade, we are thrilled to welcome the pioneering artist back to Denmark, where he took part in his first group exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1984.
- Text by Jesper Elg