Steven Shearer

Steven Shearer was born in 1968 in New Westminster, British Columbia, and earned his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1992. He continues to live and work in Vancouver. His practice spans painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation, and frequently draws on found and collaged photography, portraiture, and text, including his own poems, to examine subcultural identity, adolescence, and the psychology of image-making.

His institutional profile built steadily through the 2000s, with solo exhibitions at De Appel in Amsterdam, Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the New Museum in New York, all in 2007 and 2008. In 2011 he represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale with the installation Exhume to Consume, a career-defining honor. A multi-decade survey followed at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 2016 to 2017, and his work has continued to appear at institutions including the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver (2021) and The George Economou Collection in Athens (2023). He joined David Zwirner's roster with his first exhibition for the gallery, Profaned Travelers, in New York in 2024, and has continued to show with both David Zwirner and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, most recently with My Moody Muse in London (2026).

Shearer has been read consistently as a serious figure in contemporary figurative painting and collage, particularly for his handling of adolescence, subcultural imagery, and the psychology of looking. Ocula Magazine's profile of the artist, drawing on curator Dieter Roelstraete, has situated him among the leading figurative painters working today, pointing to his treatment of androgyny and the ethics of looking as central to ongoing cultural debates. That critical framing has held through his subsequent survey shows and his move to David Zwirner and Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

Shearer's market is comparatively thin relative to his institutional profile. His highest recorded auction result is The Late Dioramist and Sons (2020), which sold for USD 787,400 at Sotheby's New York in The Now Evening Auction on 18 May 2023, a figure corroborated by Sotheby's own listing and by independent market databases including MutualArt, HENI, and Artnet. A complete ranked history of his sales beyond that top result could not be confirmed from public sources. Prints have realized far lower prices, reportedly up to roughly USD 48,600, per aggregated market data.

Shearer's strongest signal is institutional rather than transactional: national representation at the Venice Biennale, a multi-year survey at a major private foundation, and representation by two blue-chip galleries all point to durable curatorial support. No catalogue raisonne has been identified, so provenance should be checked directly against gallery and studio records. Public auction data for this artist is sparse beyond a single well-documented top result, so collectors should treat any additional reported sale price with caution rather than as evidence of a stable market trend.