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  4. 2013

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Past Exhibitions: 2013

Steve McQueen

16 March – 1 September 2013

In 2013 Schaulager showcases the multifarious oeuvre of the video artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen by building a veritable City of Cinemas.

Schaulager is presenting the first comprehensive exhibition of work by the radical British video artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. For the first time, more than twenty video and film installations, photographs and other selected work will be on view in a larger context. For this unprecedented show, two floors of the Schaulager have been architecturally transformed into a custom-built City of Cinemas. Interior and exterior spaces with viewing apertures, mirrors and variations in light intensities and degrees of darkness provide surprising insights into the artist's work.

“Steve McQueen” is an experience quite unlike a conventional exhibition. Works with moving images make greater demands on the viewer's time than paintings or sculptures. Therefore, the admission tickets are valid for three visits to the exhibition. Much like going to the cinema, the exhibition is open from afternoon to evening. Every Thursday evening is Schaulager Night: the exhibition, with accompanying special events, is open until 10 p.m. with a selection of tasty refreshments available in the café bar. Additionally, there is an attractive programme of tours, talks, filmscreenings, workshops and a symposium. The details and dates are listed in the exhibition booklet, handed out for free at Schaulager, as well as on this website, which is regularly updated. We wish you a fascinating visit to the exhibition “Steve McQueen”.


Installation view: Steve McQueen, Static, 2009, installation view, Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, Gift of the president 2012, on permanent loan to the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Courtesy the Artist © Steve McQueen, photo: © Tom Bisig, Basel

Installation view: Steve McQueen, Charlotte, 2004, Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, Gift of the president 2012, on permanent loan to the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Courtesy the Artist © Steve McQueen, photo: © Tom Bisig, Basel

Installation view: Bear, 1993, installation view, Courtesy the Artist / Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris and Thomas Dane Gallery, London © Steve McQueen, photo: © Tom Bisig, Basel

Installation view: Steve McQueen, Five Easy Pieces, 1995, Courtesy the Artist / Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris and Thomas Dane Gallery, London © Steve McQueen, photo: © Tom Bisig, Basel

Installation view: Steve McQueen, Queen and Country, 2007-2009, Collection Imperial War Museums, presented by The Art Fund, Courtesy the Artist © Steve McQueen, photo: © Tom Bisig, Basel

Steve McQueen was born in London in 1969; he lives and works in Amsterdam and London. From 1989 to 1990, Steve McQueen studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, and from 1990 to 1993 at Goldsmiths College, London. He continued his studies from 1993 to 1994 at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. In 1999, he was guest artist of the DAAD Artists-in-Residence programme in Berlin. Steve McQueen has received many grants and awards for his work as an artist, including the ICA Futures Award (1996) and the Turner Prize (1999). In 2009 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. In parallel with his artistic work, Steve McQueen has been making feature films, for which he has won numerous awards. In 2008 he was awarded the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Hunger, and in 2011 his film Shame was granted the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film at the Venice International Film Festival. In 2003 Steve McQueen was commissioned official UK war artist (Iraq) by the Imperial War Museum’s Art Commissions Committee. Already an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE, 2002), Steve McQueen was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to the visual arts.

Nothing could be more appropriate than to speak of a “body of work” in reference to the wide-ranging and yet clearly defined oeuvre of the British artist Steve McQueen (born in 1969 in London). The artist, now in the midst of his career, has already received many awards for his work, which is in ceaseless development and transformation. Each new piece is surprising for its precision and the courage in taking new directions, as demonstrated once again in the works created especially for the present show.


Steve McQueen, Deadpan, 1997

Steve McQueen, Western Deep, 2002


Steve McQueen’s career began in the 1990s, with short video and film installations whose experimental thrust, well-nigh tangible materiality and physical effect on the viewer charted new territory. A decade later, his artistic idiom had expanded to include longer, more narratively oriented films, and in 2008 he ventured into making feature films. In addition to film, McQueen works with photography and creates such pieces as the deeply moving Queen and Country (2007–2009). Just as his first film installation Bear (1993) made waves on the art scene, his first feature film, Hunger (2008), hit the film world like a bombshell. In this domain, unusual for a fine artist, his matured cinematic skills flow into a new, though related form. McQueen’s choice of medium is inspired by his subject matter: each theme, he believes, requires a specific type of treatment, which applies equally to his latest film, Twelve Years a Slave, due for release in autumn 2013.


The physicality of any kind of work is always the key to bring people inside the work.


Crucial to the artist’s works are detailed, extremely precise instructions regarding their installation. The type of projection, the size and colour of the space and the quality of the sound are all integral to the overall presence of each work. Similarly, the artist determines whether works are shown as a loop or scheduled as in a film theatre. Organized in collaboration with The Art Institute of Chicago, this unprecedented overview has given McQueen the opportunity to test new forms of presentation and interrelate his works. The uncompromising re-evaluation of his own work now gives viewers a compelling, rarely seen take on the moving image.

As a rule, Carib’s Leap is shown in tandem with Western Deep (both 2002). Here, for the first time, it is screened separately and in the entirely different dimensions of the LED walls on the Schaulager façade. Outdoors in the light of day, the moving pictures communicate directly with the environment. The artist has introduced another striking variation in the unusual means of presentation he has devised for the three works with which he began his career twenty years ago. Bear (1993), Five Easy Pieces (1995) and Just Above My Head (1996) are juxtaposed by being projected on a triangular screen in the middle of the room. The open presentation of multiple viewpoints generates a presence in space that transforms the films into an extension of sculpture in moving images, revealing their seminal influence on the development of McQueen’s later work.

Moving pictures have a magical force that pulls us into their orbit, not least because video and film installations take place in the dark and generally in purpose-built spaces. We enter a room illuminated only by the projection screen; we are enveloped, we forget time and place — and then we are usually discharged back into the glaring light of day. In the exhibition, this abrupt break is softened by a gradual transition to dim lighting conditions. Darkness is not simply darkness: its variations become evident when visitors move between transparency and enclosure, interior and exterior spaces, when they see through apertures and experience reflections in mirrors. As in the interlocking architecture of a city, the exhibition design provides open areas and sight lines between the buildings, or rather, between the individual works.

The term City of Cinemas pinpoints this idea, and at the same time it is a metaphor for the overall cohesion of the pieces, which can only be appreciated by investing viewing time in a single stretch. In this City of Cinemas, the works come together: they interact and yet they are each self-contained. The precise use of sound in the video and film installations makes an even greater impact in this atmosphere, contributing to the almost mystical mood — we become acutely aware of our own presence in space and we are an inseparable part of the whole.


Weiterführende Texte


Downloads

  • Exhibition Leaflet(pdf, 484.26 KB)

Catalogue

The publication, which accompanied the 2013 exhibition of works by Steve McQueen at Schaulager Basel–the world’s largest to date–comprises an extensively documented catalogue of the complete works of the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen from 1992 to 2012. There are illustrations of all the works, many of them on fold-out plates. Texts by a series of top-class authors–the artistic director of the Toronto In­ternational Film Festival, Cameron Bailey ; the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Okwui Enwezor ; art historians Georges Didi-Huberman and Jean Fisher ; and the curator of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, James Rondeau–and a substantial discussion with the artist offer deeper insights into Steve McQueen’s work and the nature of his powerful, thought-provoking creativity.


Steve McQueen
Works
Catalogue raisonné, published by the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel

With essays by Jean Fisher, Okwui Enwezor, Georges Didi-Huberman, James Rondeau and Cameron Bailey and a conversation between Adrian Searle and Steve McQueen

248 pages, 22.5 × 28.5 cm, 268 images, hardcover with dust cover
The publication is available in English and German
1st edition 2013


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