FUTURA 2000 FUTURA 2020 at ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

James Kalm is floating through the Lower East Side, drifting towards SoHo when he beelines it to the new Eric Firestone Gallery, and takes in a viewing of FUTURA 2000-FUTURA 2020. Having been acquainted with Futura 2000 (Leonard Hilton McGurr) since bumping into him at the Fun Gallery in the early 1980s, your reporter has watched his career arch, and development from one of the early celebrity Graffiti artists, to his current status as a Graff-Ab-Exer hybrid. Futura 2020 seems to cement the artist’s reputation as a proto Graff artist while also establishing his linage to the New York school of Abstract Expressionism, and Action Painting. By employing large scale, urgent painterly gesture, and raw canvas, Futura recalls the “tradition of the New” as coined by Harold Rosenberg the “Godfather of Action Painting” in the early 1950s. #jameskalmreport #jameskalmroughcut #lorenmunk