Paintings
12 works
James McQueen If You Ever Leave Me For Sale
James McQueen
If You Ever Leave Me
Acrylic and mixed-media on canvas
1.6 × 152.4 cm
About this work
If You Ever Leave Me on canvas marks a significant shift in James McQueen's practice from works on paper to the more expansive, physical presence of painted canvas. In this acrylic and mixed-media work, McQueen revisits one of his most emotionally resonant phrases — a conditional declaration that hovers between affection and desperation — and gives it the scale and substance of a major painting. The canvas ground allows for bolder gestural gestures and a more painterly approach than his paper works, while the integration of mixed media ensures the surface retains its characteristic layered complexity. On canvas, If You Ever Leave Me takes on additional weight: the phrase, already charged with feeling, becomes more monumental. McQueen's approach allows him to work more expansively, building up surface through layers of acrylic and other media. The painting's immediacy and frankness are entirely characteristic of an artist who has built his practice on the idea that sincerity and wit are not mutually exclusive. This work belongs to McQueen's sustained engagement with the language of romantic attachment — the phrases that circulate between people in love, in conflict, and in all the complex, unresolved emotional spaces in between. On canvas, these expressions become paintings in the fullest sense: large, physical presences that carry meaning through both their words and their materiality. If You Ever Leave Me is among the most emotionally direct works in McQueen's body of work.
Browse Series
Edition & Provenance
- Medium
- Acrylic and mixed-media on canvas
About James McQueen
James McQueen Paintings for Sale | Guy Hepner, New York
James McQueen is a British artist born in 1977 whose paintings sit at the intersection of Pop sensibility, material obsession, and dry British wit. He works under a pseudonym, and his identity is secondary to the work — which is the point. What matters is what ends up on the canvas.
McQueen's paintings are built, not simply applied. He works in layers — paint over paint, colour over colour — then sands the surface back to expose what lies beneath, then seals it in lacquer. The result is a depth that photographs struggle to capture. These are surfaces you need to stand in front of.
His subject matter has ranged from reinterpreted Penguin paperback covers to politically charged commentary to the large-scale mixed-media Anthology works now available through Guy Hepner. Across all of it runs a consistent preoccupation: the visual language of mass culture, rendered monumental and unfamiliar by the seriousness of the craft brought to bear on it.
McQueen has shown extensively in London and is represented in significant private collections internationally.
Guy Hepner | 177 Tenth Avenue, New York