Steve McQueen

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to inaugurate its Los Angeles gallery with a solo exhibition dedicated to artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. The exhibition features, among recent works, the U.S. premiere of the immersive video installation Sunshine State (2022). As Cora Gilroy-Ware has written in her extensive essay, “In the Dead of the Light: Steve McQueen’s Sunshine State,” in the 2022 exhibiton catalogue for Pirelli HangarBicocca:

“Sunshine State is a work of oral history, an autobiographical revelation … that explores race, identity, racial categorization and stereotypes. McQueen’s story of his West Indian father as an agricultural laborer in Florida is layered over scenes from the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer. If a father’s memory of the 1950s, relayed by his son in the twenty first century, was already an unexpected voiceover for the comparatively archaic film footage on screen, the moment of collision between these two … adds an extra degree of dissonance. His use of negative footage in Sunshine State works to expose the artificiality of the categories ‘black’ and ‘white’ when applied to human forms.

The voiceover in Sunshine State reveals that trauma can be a force that binds, a cord tying one generation to the next with an ineffable tightness. By the end, McQueen and the 1927 film character appear to have something vital in common; their reverse responses to their fathers’ pain and the trappings of their identities turn them into negative and positive images of one another.

Throughout the film, the sun serves as the connective tissue between the past and the present, and serves as a symbol of the changing landscapes of history and identity that McQueen explores in his work.”

Sunshine State was originally commissioned for the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022 and made possible with the support of the Municipality of Rotterdam, Stichting Droom en Daad, Rotterdam Festivals and Nederlands Filmfonds.

Steve McQueen (b. 1969) is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores universal themes, often addressing painful and challenging histories. Recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation, Steve McQueen’s practice exposes the fragility of the human condition in his work.

Awarded the Turner Prize in 1999, McQueen has had his artwork presented at some of the most significant venues and museums around the world. His work has been featured in Documenta (1997 and 2002). He represented Great Britain at the 53rd 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); 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 HangarBicocca, Milan, in 2022. In April/May 2023, he presented Grenfell at the Serpentine South Gallery, London.

McQueen has directed four feature films. 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. His most recent film, Occupied City, a portrait of Nazi and modern-day Amsterdam, debuted at Cannes Film Festival in May 2023 and will be shown at the upcoming New York Film Festival. MᶜQueen is currently in post production on Blitz, a new feature about the Second World War.

McQueen was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002 and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2011. He was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honors list. McQueen was born in West London and is based in London and Amsterdam.