2023
Middle Ages, Munch, Metalheads: In Steven Shearer's pictures, the eras blur into a magical in-between world. A conversation with probably the strangest painter of today
Mullet types with bad skin and the angelic aura of medieval painting, brooding youths with delirious echoes of the world of Edvard Munch - in his paintings and drawings of predominantly male, often explicitly androgynous figures, Steven Shearer combines motifs from Western art history with a personal exploration of the Youth culture of the 1970s and the proletarian aesthetics of the global metal underground.
The Canadian, born in 1968, comes from the environment of Vancouver's post-conceptual art scene, played in the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and is now considered to be the inspiration for a new wave of symbolistically charged portrait painting. Shearer himself is as introverted as his characters. There are no portraits of him on the Internet and he rarely gives interviews. On the occasion of his current exhibition at the George Economou Collection in Athens, which includes his paintings, drawings and JPEG collages, the shy Canadian made an exception and met with curators Dieter Roelstraete and Skarlet Smatana for a conversation, which we have published in an abridged version print.