The most in-depth and comprehensive survey of the life and career of one of the pioneering
artists of the original graffiti generation. Having forged his graphic style painting subways
in New York in the late 1970s Futura was among the first graffiti artists to be shown in
contemporary galleries in the early 1980s where his paintings shared space with works by Keith
Haring Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. As the commercialization of street culture in
the 1990s inspired collaborations with fashion and lifestyle brands Futura's work moved toward
a more refined expression of his abstract graffiti style. Commissions from era-defining brands
such as A Bathing Ape Stüssy Supreme and Mo' Wax saw his artwork canonized as an elemental
component of the street aesthetic. Collected here among never-before-published reproductions
of earlier paintings and drawings is an archive of personal photography and ephemera that
reveals how integral Futura has been to the evolution of street art and culture. Guided through
more than forty years of work and with interviews with key players in Futura's career this is
at once a definitive monograph of a legend of contemporary art and an indispensable chapter in
the history of graffiti.
