futura2000: pointman – river warrior

New York City artist Futura2000, in collaboration with Potato Head, has created two sculptures titled ‘Pointman – River Warrior,’ which are to be unveiled in Singapore and Bali.

Created using waste collected across the island of Bali, Pointman speaks to Potato Head’s ideation that sustainability can be beautiful.

Futura2000, initially lauded as a pioneering graffiti artist, is known for his ground-breaking use of abstraction in the 1980s and has always been progressive in his philosophy, methodology, and practice of art. Adjacent to his body of abstract paintings, he has developed a universe and lexicon around an otherworldly character: the Pointman. Over the years, Pointman has taken many forms across drawing, painting, and sculpture. The collaboration with Potato Head sees Pointman emerge with a new mission in the materials of its design. River and ocean pollution has long been a central concern of Futura2000. Located on the Hudson River in New York City, the view from his studio of the Statue of Liberty is obscured by vessels transporting trash and free-floating river garbage. In reaction to this, the use of waste for the fabrication of the sculptures is a social commentary on the pollution crisis faced by both rivers and tributaries in New York City, and Southeast Asia.

The Singapore Pointman sculpture utilised 14,300 black and white grocery bags collected from Bali rivers by the environmental advocate organisation Sungai Watch. The sculpture will be unveiled at the National Design Centre of Singapore on November 26, with a party to commemorate the project.

The exhibition is a temporary stop on a world tour showcasing how waste can be reimagined creatively, and spread Potato Head’s ‘Good Times, Do Good’ mantra.

On December 9, the courtyard of the OMA-designed Potato Head Studios in Bali will be home to the second River Warrior sculpture.

For this Pointman, everything from motor oil bottles to discarded water gallon lids sourced by the community organisation, Yayasan Kakikita, were used. An event will bring together traditional Balinese ideals with Futura2000’s urban aesthetic. It will feature a performance by Australian dance company Chunky Move, talks, craft beers, and Balinese food stalls.

Futura Laboratories x Potato Head t-shirts, tote bags, and tumblers will be sold at both launches. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Sungai Watch to support their mission of cleaning Bali’s rivers.

About FUTURA2000 FUTURA2000 (b. Leonard Hilton McGurr, 1955, New York) is an abstract painter whose practice first developed in New York during the 1970s. One of the earliest graffiti artists to introduce abstraction into his work, FUTURA2000 was also among the first graffiti artists to be shown in contemporary art galleries in the early 1980s. Early exhibitions of his work include presentations at Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, as well as within the historic Times Square show of 1980, alongside Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rammellzee, and Kenny Scharf. MoMA PS1 brought the artists together again in its landmark 1981 exhibition, New York / New Wave. FUTURA2000 collaborated with the punk band The Clash during this time as well, designing their album art and painting on large scale canvases behind the band as they performed in concert.

In recent years, he created collaborative works with Takashi Murakami and exhibited them at Kaikai KiKi Gallery in Tokyo. He worked with Virgil Abloh on collections for Off-White and Louis Vuitton and stage visuals for the designer at Coachella. FUTURA2000’s work has been shown at The New Museum, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands; and Yvon Lambert, Galerie De Noirmont, and the Galerie du jour agnès b., Paris. In 2020, the Noguchi Museum presented Futura Akari, an installation of Akari light sculptures customized by FUTURA2000; he created a large site-specific installation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and he was included in the exhibition Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip Hop Generation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

BALI, 9 DECEMBER 2022: “FUTURA2000: POINTMAN – RIVER WARRIOR”

Sculpture Unveiling & Launching Party