James McQueen I Won't Tell If You Don't | 1/1 For Sale

About this work

I Won't Tell If You Don't is a unique 1/1 mixed-media work on fine art paper in which James McQueen gives voice to a phrase that is at once conspiratorial, playful, and charged with the particular intimacy of shared secrets. Executed in acrylic, spray paint, ink, and silkscreen, the work exemplifies McQueen's layered approach to text-based art, combining multiple techniques to produce a surface of genuine visual interest and emotional depth. The phrase is one of complicity: it implies transgression, shared experience, and the mutual agreement to keep something between two people. McQueen extracts from these six words a whole world of suggestion — humour, intimacy, the excitement of confidentiality — and renders them through a process that is itself part spontaneous and part deliberate, much like the scenarios the phrase implies. The combination of gestural spray paint and ink with the precision of silkscreen captures exactly this ambiguity. As a 1/1 edition, I Won't Tell If You Don't occupies a unique position within McQueen's output. A work concerned with secrecy and discretion that exists as a singular, unrepeatable object — the designation is, in this case, doubly apt. McQueen has established a committed international following for his language-based practice, and this work demonstrates why: its ability to locate meaning, wit, and emotional resonance in the everyday phrases that define how people live and relate.