Paintings
12 works
James McQueen No Risk No Story For Sale
James McQueen
No Risk No Story
Acrylic and mixed-media on canvas
101.6 × 152.4 cm
About this work
No Risk No Story is a horizontal-format acrylic and mixed-media canvas measuring 101.6 × 152.4 cm, in which James McQueen presents one of his most motivational and aphoristic text works. The phrase — pithy, declarative, and carrying an implicit challenge — is rendered through McQueen's layered approach to painting, in which acrylic is combined with mixed media to produce surfaces of genuine visual complexity. At over 150 cm wide, the canvas gives the text a commanding presence. McQueen is alert to the way in which phrases like this function in contemporary life: as mantras, as captions, and as the compressed wisdom of risk-takers and storytellers. By rendering 'No Risk No Story' on a large, carefully made canvas, he simultaneously celebrates and questions the currency of such expressions — honouring their directness while acknowledging their life as cultural shorthand. The result is a work that is both legible and layered, immediate and considered. The mixed-media surface of the canvas allows McQueen to build up the work with a physicality that paper cannot accommodate, embedding the text within a ground of material richness. This is painting in the full sense — a work that exists not only as image or statement but as a physical object, with all the presence and authority that implies. No Risk No Story is a strong example of McQueen's capacity to make large-scale, text-based painting that works on multiple levels simultaneously.
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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