Paintings
12 works
James McQueen Shit Happens For Sale
James McQueen
Shit Happens
Acrylic and mixed-media on canvas
101.6 × 152.4 cm
About this work
The canvas version of Shit Happens brings James McQueen's most fatalistic phrase to the scale of a major painting. Measuring 101.6 × 152.4 cm, this acrylic and mixed-media work on canvas gives the phrase a material weight and physical authority that the works on paper approach differently. The horizontal format provides a broad field across which the text can breathe and assert itself, while the layered painting process creates a surface that documents the work's own making. 'Shit happens' is perhaps the most efficiently philosophical expression in the modern English language: two words that encompass an entire worldview of resilient acceptance, stoic humour, and hard-won equanimity. McQueen takes this phrase entirely seriously as an artistic subject, rendering it with the care and deliberateness that would more typically be associated with a historical subject or a landscape. The irony — and the wit — is that the phrase itself resists any such gravity, remaining resolutely colloquial however it is presented. On canvas and at this scale, Shit Happens becomes a significant physical presence. McQueen's mixed-media approach builds the painting with layers of acrylic and other materials, giving the surface a richness appropriate to the work's ambitions. This is a piece for collectors who appreciate art that is simultaneously funny, honest, and formally accomplished — a combination that defines McQueen's practice at its best.
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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