Steve McQueen, the Best Picture Winner Who Keeps Going Back to the Gallery

Steve McQueen

Photo: Dublin International Film Festival / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 9, 1969 London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Film director and artist
Known for	12 Years a Slave, Shame, Hunger
Awards	Academy Award · BAFTA · Golden Globe · Caméra d'Or, Cannes Film Festival · Turner Prize · Erasmus Prize · Knight Bachelor

In a darkened gallery in Bilbao, two voices that never met sing the same song from opposite walls. Nina Simone takes one end of the room and David Bowie the other, both stripped of their bands, both singing “Wild Is the Wind”. Visitors walk between the two recordings and become, in the artist’s own framing, the other voice in the work. For a man who has won the highest prize Hollywood gives, it is a revealing way to spend an autumn. Steve McQueen’s best-known films have reached millions, but the questions that drive him are still the ones he first asked in rooms like this one, where the audience has to move in order to see.

This Steve McQueen is not the American star of Bullitt and The Great Escape; the two share a name and nothing else. Sir Steve McQueen was born in London to a Grenadian father and a Trinidadian mother, and grew up in Ealing, in the west of the city. At Drayton Manor High School he was put in a class meant, as he later described it, for “manual labour, more plumbers and builders”. He was dyslexic and wore an eyepatch for a lazy eye; a later head teacher told him the school had been institutionally racist at the time.

Art got him out. He studied at Chelsea College of Arts and then at Goldsmiths, where painting gave way to film. A short spell at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts ended because, he complained, “they wouldn’t let you throw the camera up in the air”. His short films of the 1990s answered that. In Bear, two naked men circle each other with looks that could be desire or threat. In Deadpan, he restages a Buster Keaton stunt, standing in the gap of a window as the front of a house crashes down around him, untouched. Silent, black and white and projected onto gallery walls, those works won him the Turner Prize in 1999, weeks after his 30th birthday.

That prize already contained a pattern. Most of the publicity that year went to Tracey Emin, and McQueen kept working at a distance from the noise. He filmed migrant labourers deep inside a South African gold mine for Western Deep, shown at documenta 11, and travelled to Iraq in 2006 as an official war artist for the Imperial War Museum. The result, Queen and Country, presented the portraits of British soldiers killed in the war as sheets of postage stamps. The Royal Mail declined to put them into circulation.

Cinema came late and arrived fully formed. Hunger, about the 1981 republican hunger strike in the Maze prison, with Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2008; no British director had taken the debut prize before. Fassbender came back for Shame, a cold portrait of a New York sex addict opposite Carey Mulligan, and again for 12 Years a Slave, adapted from Solomon Northup’s 1853 account of a free Black man kidnapped and sold into slavery. With Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead and Lupita Nyong’o winning an Oscar for her supporting role, the film took Best Picture in 2014 and the BAFTA for Best Film. As one of its producers, McQueen became the first Black filmmaker to win Best Picture, and the first person to win both an Academy Award and the Turner Prize.

He presented the film as a correction rather than a triumph. The Second World War, he said in 2014, lasted five years and has produced hundreds of films; slavery lasted 400 years, and the films about it numbered fewer than 20. Six years later he wrote in The Guardian about the “blatant racism” of the British film and television industry, recalling a London set whose whiteness he could not believe.

The next move confused anyone who wanted a neat line. Widows, co-written with Gillian Flynn and led by Viola Davis, was a Chicago heist thriller built from a British television series of the 1980s. Then came Small Axe, five films for BBC One and Prime Video set in London’s West Indian community between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Mangrove and Lovers Rock were both selected for the Cannes edition that the pandemic cancelled; Lovers Rock, a single night at a house party, topped Sight and Sound’s critics’ poll for 2020; and the final film, Education, drew on his own schooling. He said he could not have made them at the start of his career, because he “didn’t have the maturity then”.

The case against McQueen is that the two halves of his work have begun to pull apart. Blitz, his return to features, follows a mixed-race boy, played by Elliott Heffernan, who escapes an evacuation train to find his way back to his mother, played by Saoirse Ronan, through bombed London. It opened the BFI London Film Festival in 2024 and went to Apple TV+ a few weeks later, and not every critic followed him there. In The Ringer, Adam Nayman argued that the film’s borrowed wartime conventions buried the artist inside them: McQueen, he wrote, “gets swallowed up by his own brilliant disguise”. The tidy story of the gallery artist who conquered Hollywood misses something: the work that has felt freest, by his critics’ own measure, is the work furthest from Hollywood.

That is where his recent years have gone. Occupied City, built on the research of his wife, the Dutch critic and historian Bianca Stigter, lays the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam over present-day footage of the same addresses; it premiered at Cannes in 2023, and a 34-hour version later played at the Rijksmuseum. Grenfell, a self-funded film about the 2017 tower fire that killed 72 people, is touring British galleries until 2027, and he has chosen to say little about it so that the attention stays with the dead and the bereaved. Through 2025 and 2026 he held Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton professorship. In March 2026 the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation named him that year’s Erasmus Prize laureate, “for his unwavering commitment to the human spirit”.

He and Stigter have kept a home in Amsterdam since 1997, alongside one in London, and have two children. He was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to art and film.

The season ahead belongs to the gallery. Works on paper by McQueen hang in Thomas Dane Gallery’s booth at Frieze London, and 66–76–26, the Simone and Bowie duet, opens at the Guggenheim Bilbao on 9 October 2026 and runs until 21 February 2027; the Erasmus Prize is due to be presented this autumn. No new feature has been announced. With McQueen, that has never meant he has stopped making films. It usually means the next one will be on a wall.