This untitled painting by celebrated graffiti artist Futura 2000 exemplifies his iconic use of cartoonish characters blended with vividly colored abstraction. Bold streaks of black and red seem to rain down in a torrent across the composition, as a distinctive character with a nonchalant expression emerges from the lower corner in stark contrast.

Futura 2000 (b. Leonard McGurr, 1955, New York) is an internationally acclaimed graffiti artist who began his career tagging New York City's subway lines in the early 1970s. A distinguishing feature of Futura 2000’s career is his pioneering, abstract approach to graffiti art in the 1980s, which in that period was a genre which mainly dominated by text. During this time, he exhibited at the Fun Gallery with contemporaries such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Richard Hambleton. He has exhibited at venues the world over including the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England; Solaria, Fukuoka, Japan; TBM Experiment, Rome, Italy; and Gallery du Jour, Paris, France, among others.