Steven Shearer

Known for his electric paintings of punk rock musicians and metalheads in moments of everyday life, Steven Shearer radically redefines the tradition of portraiture. Shearer’s acclaimed 20-year career is marked by a visual lexicon of figural representations, often employing found imagery that he collects and archives as source material. Through this process, contemporary imagery is reimagined, revealing affinities between various modes of figuration throughout history to the present. Shearer’s adept portraits of figures painted in interior spaces recall figures from decades of musical subcultures with art historical stylistic references from Fauvism and Symbolism to German Romantic Art. Both angsty and luscious, the artist’s mannerist depictions ingeniously reveal illusory, psychedelic worlds.

Born in New Westminster, Canada, in 1968, Shearer earned his BFA in 1992 from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work. Shearer has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions, most recently, an wide-spanning retrospective at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, in 2016. In 2011, Shearer represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale with the exhibition Exhume to Consume, the title of which was taken from the 1989 song by British metal band Carcass. In June 2023, a solo presentation of Shearer’s work will go on view at The George Economou Collection in Athens with a coinciding major monograph published on the artist’s work.