Steven Shearer

2026 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts

Born in New Westminster, British Columbia, in 1968, Steven Shearer is a Vancouver-based contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice has evolved over more than three decades. A graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992, Shearer works across painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, printmaking and collage. His work is distinguished by an expansive engagement with images and objects drawn from both art history and everyday visual culture, bringing together seemingly disparate references including heavy metal, popular culture, youth subcultures, vernacular imagery and the internet.

Central to Shearer’s practice is a sustained process of collecting, archiving and transforming images. Over the course of his career, he has amassed tens of thousands of photographs and pieces of printed material sourced from books, magazines, record-related imagery, eBay and online archives. His collection encompasses anonymous figures, musicians, bedrooms, toolsheds and other fragments of ordinary life alongside images with established cultural or art-historical significance. Rather than treating these materials as static source material, Shearer continually reworks and recontextualizes them, allowing images to move between photography, painting, drawing, sculpture and collage.

This process of juxtaposition is fundamental to Shearer’s work. By placing images associated with popular and vernacular culture alongside references to the history of fine art, he challenges conventional distinctions between high and low culture. Across his practice, Shearer has returned to themes of identity, memory, isolation, vulnerability and mortality, while remaining attentive to the ways images can shape personal experience and collective memory.

Shearer’s engagement with popular culture is particularly evident in his longstanding interest in heavy metal and youth subcultures. Music, fashion, bedrooms, album imagery and other forms of subcultural expression become part of a broader visual vocabulary through which he examines belonging, desire, adolescence and the construction of identity. 

Shearer’s practice has developed alongside major changes in the ways images are produced, collected and shared. Most recently, Shearer has incorporated artificial intelligence into his painting practice, extending his longstanding investigation of appropriation and image-making into emerging forms of technology. Rather than representing a departure from his earlier work, this engagement continues his interest in how new technologies transform the ways images are generated, encountered and understood.

Shearer’s international profile reached a significant milestone in 2011, when he represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale. His exhibition Exhume to Consume brought together paintings, drawings and sculpture and reflected the eclectic range of references that had come to define his practice. The presentation established a major international platform for Shearer’s work, following a career that had already seen his work exhibited at leading institutions in Canada, the United States and Europe.

His exhibition history includes Tate Modern, London; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the George Economou Collection in Athens. He has also exhibited extensively with Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich and David Zwirner in New York and London.

Recent solo exhibitions include My Moody Muse, David Zwirner, London (2026); Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2025); Profaned Travelers, David Zwirner, New York (2024); George Economou Collection, Athens (2023–24); The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2021–22); and Brant Foundation, Connecticut (2016). His work has entered major public and private collections internationally, and his forthcoming solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum is scheduled for 2027.

While Shearer’s work has been exhibited internationally for more than three decades, Vancouver has remained the base of his practice. Working from the city throughout his career, he has developed an approach that is deeply engaged with global visual culture while maintaining a distinct connection to the creative context of British Columbia.

In 2026, Shearer was named the recipient of the $100,000 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts. The award recognizes his sustained contribution to contemporary art and a career defined by continual experimentation, an expansive approach to image-making and a singular ability to find new meaning in the visual material that surrounds us.