Sideshow Rigmarole, 2020 was first shown at Steven Shearer’s 2021–22 solo presentation at the Polygon Gallery, Vancouver. It is the artist’s largest installation to date and comprises thirty-three discrete works that extend across the length of a gallery wall. Shearer's print works complement his painting practice, and likewise illuminate the diversity of images that constitute his extensive archive of around 58,000 images and 16,000 clippings from publications such as Tiger Beat (established 1965), Flip (established 1960), and Teen Bag. This installation brings together images from clippings of magazines that circulated from 1970 to 1972. Steven Shearer’s work, which also includes drawing, assemblage, sculpture, and installation, deploys a wide range of references as well as a vast archive of historical and contemporary found images. Co-presented with David Zwirner.
Upcoming Exhibition
Steven Shearer, The Green Collector, 2021
STEVEN SHEARER
Sleep, Death's Own Brother
The George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece
June 18, 2023 – March 2024
Opening on Sunday, June 18, 12 – 8 pm
The exhibition takes as its point of departure Sleep II (2015), a monumental collage made up of thousands of found images—all of them JPEGs sourced online—depicting people asleep. A breathtaking tour de force balancing color, scale, structure, and subject matter, the sprawling mosaic shows a wide variety of somnolent states, from the peaceful and the comedic to the ecstatic and downright morbid. Titled after a line from Hesiod’s eighth-century BC epic poem Theogony (“Harmful Night, veiled in dusky fog, carries in her arms Sleep, Death’s own brother”), the exhibition revolves around this uneasy proximity (“brotherhood”) between death and sleep, a recurring trope in Shearer’s art. Built around the George Economou Collection’s substantial holdings of Steven Shearer’s work in painting and printed matter, Sleep, Death’s Own Brotherproposes an in-depth look at the oeuvre of this Vancouver-based artist from the transgressive thematic perspective of the lifeless body, which is sometimes truly, sometimes only seemingly dead.
Read more about the exhibition here.
Upcoming Publication
STEVEN SHEARER
Working from Life
The Canadian artist's first major monograph with an essay by Dieter Roelstraete.
“Today’s images are echoes of how people have always been depicted.”
Steven Shearer (b. New Westminster, BC, 1968; lives and works in Vancouver) works in a range of media including printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing, and collages of found photographs. His portraits of individuals in decorated settings earned Shearer international acclaim. They show heroes from the past—protagonists of musical subcultures or the history of art. The archetypal creative minds in their studios appear together with their works; the interiors surrounding them reflect their psychological constitution. Shearer paints them in the style of Symbolism, the German Romantics, or the Fauves. Imitating the perspective painting of the Renaissance, he virtually pulls the beholder into his pictures.
Learn more about the publication here.
