Biography
McQueen has mastered the art of minimalist storytelling to deliver the utmost impact on his viewers.
Steve MᶜQueen was born in West London in 1969. He is based in London and Amsterdam. His themes are universal and often focus on painful biographies. MᶜQueen has mastered the art of minimalist storytelling to deliver the utmost impact on his viewers. In his own words he "wants to put the public in a situation where everyone becomes acutely sensitive to themselves, to their body and respiration."
MᶜQueen has directed four feature films, most recently Widows (2018). His first, Hunger (2008), was awarded the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and his third, 12 Years a Slave (2013), received the Golden Globe, Oscar, and BAFTA awards for best picture in 2014. In 2020, he made Small Axe, an anthology of five films about London’s West Indian community and in 2021 Uprising, a 3-part documentary with James Rogan, about the New Cross Fire in London in 1981. He has recently completed Occupied City, which will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023 and is in post-production on Blitz, a new feature about the second world war which is expected to be released in late 2023.
Celebrated internationally for his art, MᶜQueen was awarded the Turner Prize in 1999. MᶜQueen has been featured in Documenta (1997 and 2002), represented Great Britain at the fifty-third Venice Biennale in 2009, and was selected several times for the Venice Biennale’s central pavilion (2003, 2007, 2013, and 2015). Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago (2012); Schaulager, Basel (2013); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2017); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017). In 2019 he presented YEAR 3 at Tate Britain and had a major one-person exhibition at Tate Modern in 2020 which toured to Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan in 2022. In Spring 2023, he presented Grenfell at the Serpentine South Gallery, London.
McQueen has mastered the art of minimalist storytelling to deliver the utmost impact on his viewers.
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