James McQueen

McQueen’s affinity to Robert Indiana lies in his ability to transform language into universally recognisable symbols. Indiana’s iconic single word works like LOVE and HOPE condensed complex emotional states into graphic forms, that exist culturally as fine art and public sculpture. McQueen draws directly from this familiar lineage in works such as STUPID CRAZY LOVE. Indiana’s LOVE image was first conceived in 1964 when he sent printed cards with the design to his friends and acquaintances. The following year, MoMA commissioned a red, blue and green version for their annual Christmas card. LOVE became one of the post popular cards the museum has ever produced, bringing the image to a wide audience for the first time. Indiana’s universal message resonated particularly strongly during the latter half of the 1960s, as a symbol of revolution and the ‘free-love’ counterculture movement.

Adopting Indiana’s bold, declarative and direct typography, McQueen complicates the message. Where the celebratory statement of ‘LOVE’ provides the focal point of this composition, ‘STUPID CRAZY LOVE’ operates almost as a response, like a confession or a playful riposte. While acknowledging love’s intensity, he resists over-romanticising it, preferring instead to immortalise it in paint.

Crucially, McQueen’s material process again introduces instability where Indiana’s works remain fixed and emblematic. Layers of paint are built up, eroded and reworked to create something very human and imperfect. In this sense, STUPID CRAZY LOVE becomes a conceptual work on the theme of love, emerging less as a slogan than as a reflection of lived experience, shaped by time and repetition.

Roy Lichtenstein played a defining role in Pop art by revealing how emotion could become mediated through mass-produced imagery. His comic-strip paintings distil moments of heightened drama into static scenes with no resolution. By stripping away context and isolating fragments of a narrative, he changed their meaning. Transforming them into forms with immediacy, Lichtenstein exposed the effect of advertising on flattening emotional experience into something public and highly consumable.

McQueen’s IT STARTED WITH A KISS engages directly with Lichtenstein’s legacy, carrying with it familiar references to film titles, pop songs and lyrics of the same name, that have contributed to the formation of certain romantic clichés embedded in collective memory. Like Lichtenstein, McQueen isolates a moment loaded with narrative potential. Here, the title becomes structurally significant rather than merely descriptive, functioning as a further medium through which the story is articulated. The kiss is merely a moment to be continued. Intriguingly, the lips in McQueen’s painting are a motif or trope inspired by Lichtenstein’s visual language, rather than a real artwork, meaning IT STARTED WITH A KISS can be read as a comment on repetition and circulation, and how it can affect our ability to perceive originality.