Steven Shearer Canadian, b. 1968

Overview

Scratchy Cheek (working title), 2015

"In general I don’t like to talk about my work. The reason I started making art in the first place is because it’s a solitary experience, a way of passing time alone. Obviously, it’s all dependent upon people seeing it in the end, and I like that there is an audience for it and that people can relate to it; but I kind of hope that it all speaks for itself." -- STEVEN SHEARER

Steven Shearer first rose to prominence in the early 2000s with a body of work rooted in a personal and idiosyncratic engagement with 1970s teen culture and the raw aesthetic of the heavy metal underground .

Mining this subcultural terrain for visual and symbolic connections to the history of painting, Shearer has developed a transhistorical approach to image-making that fuses the everyday with the art historical canon.

Steven Shearer's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at leading institutions around the world, affirming his significance in contemporary art.

Most recently, in 2024, Sleep, Death’s Own Brother was presented at The George Economou Collection in Athens, coinciding with the publication of Steven Shearer: Working from Life, a major monograph released by DCV. That same year, Shearer debuted Profaned Travelers at David Zwirner, New York.

In 2016, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, hosted a retrospective that spanned paintings, drawings, collages, and poems, accompanied by a comprehensive monograph.

Shearer represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 with Exhume to Consume, titled after a track by British metal band Carcass. His presentation included a monumental mural from his Poems series, dramatically installed on the multi-story façade of the Canadian Pavilion.

Works