COPE2

Cope2 was born Fernando Carlo Jr. in 1968 and raised in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. He began writing his name across New York in 1978, at the age of ten, and spent the following two decades working the subway lines and streets of the city — most persistently the 4 line — becoming one of the most consistently visible writers of his generation. He is entirely self-taught. In the early 1980s he founded the crew Kids Destroy, later renamed Kings Destroy, and he continues to live and work in New York.

Two forms have anchored the work from the beginning: the tag and the bubble letter. On canvas Cope2 works in aerosol, marker and acrylic, building surfaces through accumulation rather than composition. Throw-ups are laid over throw-ups, drips and overspray are left where they fall, and the signature is repeated until individual letters begin to loosen into field and colour. Nothing is corrected out. The paintings hold the same compressed, improvised speed as work made illegally in the street, and they carry the evidence of their own making — the overlapping layers reading less as design than as duration, one mark answering the last.

What the work is finally about is the name: its repetition, its persistence, and the demand to be seen that drove the practice in the first place. That subject is inseparable from his own history — the Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s, the risks the work carried, and a refusal to stop that has outlasted every attempt by the city to erase it. He belongs to the second generation of New York writers, those who inherited the form from its inventors and pushed it through the decade in which it was most heavily policed.

 He has consistently rejected any distinction between what he makes on a wall and what he makes on canvas, treating the move indoors as a change of surface rather than of intention, which places the paintings in an unresolved position between writing and abstraction — a tension he has never sought to settle.

Cope2 began exhibiting in galleries in the early 2000s and has since held solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Copenhagen, San Francisco, Detroit, Paris, Venice, Hamburg, Berlin, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and London. His work has been presented in institutional exhibitions at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, in Urban Art. Graffiti 21 at the Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte in Germany, and in TAG au Grand Palais in Paris in 2009, and was included in The (S) Files biennial at El Museo del Barrio in 2011. In May 2014 he was selected to paint the Houston Bowery Wall in Manhattan, the mural site first painted by Keith Haring in 1982.

 In 2022 Schiffer Publishing issued the monograph Cope2: The Evolving Art of a Bronx Graffiti Legend, with contributions from Shepard Fairey, Mr. Cartoon, T-Kid, Wane COD and Carlos Mare. His work has also travelled well beyond the art world, appearing in the documentary Style Wars and in Grand Theft Auto IV, and in commissions for Time magazine, Adidas and Converse.

SELECTED CV

Born 1968, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2024 Unhinged, D'Stassi Art, London, United Kingdom

2021 Greatness, One Art Space, New York, NY, USA

2021 Following My Path, JPS Gallery, Hong Kong

2020 Here and Now, JPS Gallery, Hong Kong

2019 Nature of an Icon, Gallery 1:1, Luxembourg

2014 Legend by Nature, Die Hamburger Galerie, Hamburg, Germany

2014 Under the Influence, AZArt Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2014 Powers of Abstraction, David Pluskwa Art Contemporain, Marseille, France

2014 Enigma, G&B Studio d'Arte Contemporanea, Venice, Italy

2013 Prolific, Ruttkowski;68, Cologne, Germany

2013 Versatile, Inner State Gallery, Detroit, MI, USA

2013 Hypnotic, Gallery 69, New York, NY, USA

2013 Perseverance, Galerie Mathgoth, Paris, France

2013 Infinite, Dirty Pilot, Cochituate, MA, USA

2012 Rebirth, Project 1 Gallery, San Francisco, CA, USA

2012 Resilient, Dorian Grey Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2012 Defiance, Galerie Mathgoth, Paris, France

2011 Last Legend, Bob Gallery, New York, NY, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2014 Cruel Summer, Jonathan LeVine Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2013 De la ligne à l'abstraction, Galerie Yves Laroche, Montreal, Canada

2013 10 Years of Wooster Collective, Jonathan LeVine Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2013 Seven, StolenSpace Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2012 New York Kings, Pure Evil Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2011 Under the Influence, Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, NY, USA

2011 The Art of Basketball (Next Wave), One Gallery, Newark, NJ, USA

2010 Burning Hearts, Galerie Mathgoth, Paris, France

2010 The Art of Basketball, Public Works Gallery, Miami, FL, USA

2010 Down by Law, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY, USA

2010 Artefacts, TT Underground Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2010 Color Correct, Eden Gallery, New York, NY, USA

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2011 Urban Art. Graffiti 21, Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte, Völklingen, Germany

2009 TAG au Grand Palais, Grand Palais, Paris, France

2008 Made From Love, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY, USA

2004 Subway Series: The New York Yankees and the American Dream, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY, USA

Biennials, Triennials and Art Fairs

2021 Art Central, Hong Kong

2020 Art Fair Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

2011 The (S) Files Biennial, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2014 Houston Bowery Wall, Goldman Properties, New York, NY, USA

2008 Music Notes, Stephen D. Hassenfeld Children's Center for Cancer, NYU Hospital, New York, NY, USA

2005 Post-Modernism? Neo-Expressionism? Just Vandalism?, Time magazine, New York, NY, USA

2005 Getting Up Block Party, Marc Ecko Unltd, New York, NY, USA

Selected Publications and Monographs

2022 Carlo, Fernando, Jr. Cope2: The Evolving Art of a Bronx Graffiti Legend. Schiffer Publishing

2011 Gastman, Roger, and Caleb Neelon. The History of American Graffiti. HarperCollins

2010 Danysz, Magda. From Style Writing to Art: A Street Art Anthology. Dokument Press

2009 Chandès, Hervé, ed. Born in the Streets: Graffiti. Thames & Hudson

2009 Felisbret, Eric, and James Prigoff. Graffiti New York. Abrams

2009 Jenkins, Sacha, and David Villorente. Piecebook: The Secret Drawings of Graffiti Writers. Prestel

2009 Lange, Todd. New York Subway Graffiti. Schiffer Publishing

2009 Maridueña, Alain. New York City Black Book Masters. On The Run