INFERNO

Steve McQeen ‘Bass’ -The Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel – To 16 november 2025.

The Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager announces Bass (2024), one of the most recent works created by Steve McQueen. The world-renowned artist and Academy Award-winning filmmaker is returning to Schaulager in June 2025, with his most abstract work to date and 12 years after the groundbreaking exhibition. Specifically attuned to the architecture of Schaulager, Bass is largely inspired by McQueen’s keen interest in the effect of light, colour and sound on our physical perception of space and time.

“What I love about light and sound is that they are both created through movement and fluidity. They can be molded into any shape, like vapor or a scent; they can sneak into any nook and cranny. I also love the beginning point where something isn’t a form as much as it is all-encompassing.”

Steve McQueen, 2025

Two publications accompany the show: Steve McQueen. Bass (2024) was published in collaboration with the Laurenz Foundation and Dia Art Foundation. The second publication focuses on the presentation of Bass at Schaulager and will be released in summer 2025. Both books were produced in close collaboration with McQueen and the designer Irma Boom. The immaterial intensity of Bass has been uniquely transferred to the pages of a book in both publications.

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Over the past two decades, British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (b.1969 in London, lives and works in London and Amsterdam) has acquired an outstanding reputation for his work. Major museums worldwide have devoted exhibitions to his award-winning œuvre, including Dia Art Foundation (2024), Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022), Tate Modern (2020), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017), Schaulager (2013), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2012). His project Year 3 was showcased at Tate Britain in 2019. McQueen received the Turner Prize in 1999, and he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. In 2014, Harvard University awarded him the W.E.B. DuBois Medal in honour of his contribution to African and African American studies and in 2016, he received the Johannes Vermeer Award from the Dutch government.

McQueen is the director of five feature films, Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), 12 Years a Slave (2013), Widows (2018), and most recently Blitz (2024). 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. McQueen won the Oscar for best motion picture for 12 Years a Slave at the Academy Awards in 2014. He 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 for achievements in both the fine arts and filmmaking and was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours list. Most recently, McQueen and his wife Bianca Stigter were awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Amsterdam for their joint project Occupied City (2024). McQueen has been appointed Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for the 2025–2026 academic year.