Steven Shearer is the recipient of the 2026 Audain Prize, certainly one of Canada’s highest visible arts honours, which comes with a money prize of C$100,000 ($71,000). Now in its twenty third yr, the prize was introduced on Wednesday (23 September) in a ceremony within the ballroom of the Fairmont Resort Vancouver, the place Shearer was praised for “a outstanding profession marked by unrelenting inventive achievement”.
The Vancouver-based multi-disciplinary artist is understood for his otherworldly and improbable portrait work and photoconceptualism-influenced photographs of Era X-era youth, which juxtapose artwork historic references with modern iconography.
Set up view of Steven Shearer: Profaned Vacationers at David Zwirner in New York, 2024 Courtesy David Zwirner
Accepting the award, Shearer spoke about his mom, who attended the previous Vancouver College of Artwork (now Emily Carr College of Artwork and Design) and his uncle, who studied at Kwantlen Neighborhood Faculty—the place the younger Shearer started his research after randomly discovering the faculty’s phone quantity within the telephone book. He additionally sang the praises of the rising artists who work as his assistants.
“I’ve all the time thought that portray for me was the end result of every part I do,” Shearer mentioned in a press release. “All the opposite works usually are not sidetracks, however they’re a means of constructing a world for the place perhaps the subject material of the work come from, and a supply of inspiration. Portray, for me, is like beginning over once more every time. There may be all the time a stage of problem that you may convey to it that retains it fascinating.”
Steven Shearer, Atheist’s Fee, 2018 © Steven Shearer. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner.
Requested by The Artwork Newspaper what he would do with the prize cash, Shearer mentioned he would re-invest it in his ever-expanding studio, the place he’s at present at work on a collection of “thriller portraits” painted from his creativeness and with assistance from new body-scanning expertise.
“Steven Shearer is internationally famend for the distinct means by which he weaves collectively canonical artwork historic references similar to Fauvist or German Romantic work with modern youth subcultures together with heavy metallic, punk and Seventies glam rock,” mentioned Emmy Lee Wall, a member of the 2026 Audain Prize’s choice committee and the manager director and chief curator of Vancouver’s Seize Images Competition. “His work collapses the standard hierarchies between ‘excessive artwork’ and the susceptible and aggressive power of juvenile rise up.”
Shearer’s work has been celebrated internationally, in reveals from Tate Fashionable in London (in 2005) to the Venice Biennale, the place he represented Canada in 2011. He’s represented by David Zwirner (and had solo reveals with the gallery in New York in 2024 and London ealier this yr) and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, which has held eight solo exhibitions of his work at its areas in Zürich, Seoul and New York over the previous 21 years. Subsequent yr he can have a solo exhibition on the Aspen Artwork Museum in Colorado.
Steven Shearer, Sleep II, 2015 © Steven Shearer. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner.
Nonetheless, his work has not all the time been celebrated in his hometown. In 2021, seven site-specific billboard works by Shearer have been commissioned for the Seize Images Competition. The photographs of individuals caught sleeping in public, which concurrently evoked Pop artwork and non secular Renaissance determine work, have been the topic of dozens of outraged emails from space residents, a few of whom discovered their exploration of the border between sleep and loss of life unsettling. After being put in alongside town’s Arbutus Greenway—a pedestrian and biking area that additionally capabilities as a venue for public artwork—the works have been eliminated the day earlier than the pageant’s official opening, by their sponsor, Pattison Outside Promoting, and changed with inventory pictures.
Established by the collector and philanthropist Michael Audain in 2004, the Audain Prize is introduced yearly by the Whistler, British Columbia-based Audain Artwork Museum, with the intention of “elevating artists from British Columbia”. Previous prize-winners are a who’s-who of Western Canada’s modern artwork greats, together with Brian Jungen, Rebecca Belmore, Dana Claxton, Ian Wallace and James Hart, amongst others.
