Paintings
6 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
James McQueen's "Shit Happens" is an acrylic and mixed-media on canvas work that takes one of the English language's most enduring pieces of vernacular philosophy and gives it the full treatment of a large-scale painting. The phrase — stoic, resigned, democratically distributed — is consistent with McQueen's characteristic use of colloquial language as conceptual raw material. On canvas, and with the material resources of acrylic and mixed media, the text or its associated imagery achieves a physical presence and pictorial weight that edition prints cannot match. McQueen's canvas works represent a distinct strand of his practice, operating at the scale and with the material ambition of painting rather than the multiplication of print. James McQueen for sale at Guy Hepner includes canvas works of this kind — original, hand-worked, materially rich — alongside the printed editions for which he is also widely known. Available for sale at Guy Hepner Gallery, New York.
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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