The British artist and film director Steve McQueen is a unique figure in contemporary culture, not least because he’s the only person to ever win both the Turner Prize (1997) and a Best Motion Picture Academy Award, for his 2013’s searing drama 12 Years a Slave. Since his emergence in the early 1990s, his starkly beautiful, politically uncompromising, and deeply affecting oeuvre has reached an audience of millions, whether through museum exhibitions or cinema and television screens. Often rooted in Black history and experience, McQueen’s moving image works, photographic projects, and (more rarely) sculptures demand that we pay unflinching attention to humanity’s capacity for violence, exploitation, and injustice. As the artist has said: ‘My only commitment – my only doctrine – is not to let the dust settle.’ 

One of his early films channeled a master of slapstick cinema

McQueen’s Deadpan (1997) recreates a sequence from Buster Keaton’s classic silent comedy Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), in which a house collapses around the title character, leaving him miraculously unscathed. While Keaton’s goofball protagonist bolts from the scene, in Deadpan the artist – who casts himself in the starring role – stands stoically amidst the wreckage, a monument to human fortitude in the face of (near) disaster. 

The theme of descent links two of his most visceral works

Shot on location in Grenada – his parents’ birthplace – McQueen’s double projection Carib’s Leap (2002) features images of tiny figures falling through the sky, a reference to the island’s Indigenous population, the last of whom leapt to their deaths in 1651, rather than surrender to French colonists. A pendant work, Western Deep (2002), takes us into the sweltering, clanging, hellish depths of a South African goldmine. Presented as a single installation, the two films link genocide and extractive capitalism to staggering effect.

His debut feature film was inspired by a childhood political awakening

Hunger (2008) is a drama about the 1981 hunger strike by imprisoned members of the Provisional IRA, starring Michael Fassbender as their leader, Bobby Sands. Promoting the film, McQueen recalled how as an 11-year-old boy he saw ‘Sands on BBC news every night…. The idea of someone who in order to be heard was not eating left a strong impression on me.’

He was embedded with British troops in Iraq

In 2006, McQueen traveled to Basra as an official war artist. This experience led to Queen and Country (2007–2010) a set of postage stamps featuring photographs of 160 British service personnel killed during the Iraq conflict, provided to him by the families of the dead. Intending this commemorative artwork to reach ‘every household and every office’ in the UK, he applied to the Royal Mail to have the stamps put into official circulation, but was met with refusal.

He has called out Hollywood’s historical amnesia

Doing the publicity rounds for 12 Years a Slave – the artist’s triple Oscar-winning adaptation of the abolitionist Solomon Northrup’s 1853 memoir of his own enslavement – McQueen told Sky News that: ‘The Second World War lasted five years and there are hundreds of films about [it] and the Holocaust. Slavery lasted 400 years and there are less than 20 [films]. We have to address that balance and look at that time in history.’

Grenfell is a memorial in film form

On June 14, 2017, 72 people died when fire engulfed a high-rise social housing block, Grenfell Tower, in West London – a horrific event that has become emblematic of the neglect of Britain’s working-class communities by corporate and governmental elites. Sixth months later McQueen, who was born less than a mile away from the site, made his extraordinary film Grenfell (2017), in which an aerial camera circles the charred ruins of the tower again and again, as though trying to make sense of this senseless, wholly avoidable tragedy. The artist has said that the work is ‘about the building, and suspending it in time. And looking. Holding, holding, holding.’

He followed in Martin Scorsese’s footsteps…by directing a fragrance ad

Like directing legend before him, in 2018 McQueen made a promo for the men’s fragrance Bleu de Chanel. Shot among the futuristic skyscrapers of Bangkok, and soundtracked with David Bowie’s Starman (1972), this short film’s aesthetic of glossy corporate eroticism recalls the artist’s sophomore feature Shame (2011), in which Michael Fassbender plays a sex-addicted New York executive.

He might be history’s most prolific school photographer

McQueen’s epic work Year 3 (2019), saw him take class photos of some 76,000 London school kids, aged 7–8. Displayed on 600 billboards throughout the British capital – one of the most diverse cities in the world – with no explanatory text save for a simple hashtag, they might be understood as a collective image of a future that is already taking shape, and of a generation who will inherit the world we have made, for good and for ill.

Bass is an essay in light, sound, and space

Due to be presented at Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel this June after its debut at DIA Beacon last year, McQueen’s immersive installation Bass (2024-2025) is his most abstract work to date. Containing neither images nor narrative, the work consists of 60 ceiling-mounted lightboxes, which slowly phase through the color spectrum, while a throbbing soundtrack fills the exhibition space, composed entirely on bass instruments – from an electric bass guitar to a West African bass ngoni – played by musicians from the Black diaspora. McQueen has said that in conceptualizing this installation, he was ‘thinking of the Middle Passage [the forced voyage of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas], and the whole idea of limbo and not being here or there’. For all its apparent formalism, Bass reflects on human stories that have been lost, or still too often go unheard.