Steven Shearer Wins Canada’s $71,000 Audain Prize

Steven Shearer, a Vancouver-based artist best known for paintings that lace historically inclined portraiture with haunting contemporary sensibilities, was awarded Canada’s prestigious Audain Prize, which comes with $100,000 (around $71,000 in US currency).

The annual prize, dedicated to British Columbia–based artists and last year awarded to Brian Jungen, is reserved for “a senior artist in recognition of their outstanding contributions to Canadian art.” It is given out by a selection committee of five curators, this year from institutions including the Audain Art Museum, Capture Photography Festival, Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum at Simon Fraser University, and Vancouver Art Gallery.

Shearer’s work, which also includes drawing, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and collage, is, according to the Audain Prize, “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.”

Shearer, who is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber and David Zwirner, is also known to be reclusive: As reported by Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail, “Until now, he said in a video shared by the Audain Prize that does not show his face, no photos of him have been shared online.”

In an interview with the Guardian earlier this year, in advance of a London show at Zwirner, Shearer said, “I wrote down lots of potential things to say, but it’s not my nature. All the hope or will to be able to communicate kind of goes into the pictures. And I try to stay out of the way once that’s happened.” The writer of the profile, Eddy Frankel, likened Shearer’s work to “Edvard Munch high on potent weed, or the fauvists drinking cheap cider in the woods behind school.”

In a conversation with fashion designer Raf Simons for Interview magazine published in June, Shearer said, “I have ways in the studio of channeling my antisocial energies. I used to slash the paintings and destroy them. Now I just do other things, and the paintings survive.”