LONDON.- David Zwirner is presenting an exhibition of work by Canadian artist Steven Shearer at the gallery’s location in London. In My Moody Muse, Shearer presents new figurative oil paintings alongside significant loans of recent works and a selection of drawings, which collectively consider his engagement with the genre of portraiture. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo presentation in the United Kingdom in nearly twenty years, and comes ahead of his forthcoming solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum in summer 2027.
Shearer’s practice weds canonical art history to the contemporary moment. His work, which includes painting, drawing, assemblage, sculpture, and installation, deploys a wide range of references as well as a vast archive of historical and contemporary found images. His compositions engage classical subjects such as the artist in their studio or the Rückenfigur, emerging from a continual exploration of portraiture.
Shearer’s sources encompass metalheads and teen idols, the proto-modernist archetypes of Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the ambiguously gendered figures of symbolist Gustave Moreau, as well as Renaissance masters such as Pieter Bruegel and Domenico Ghirlandaio. The archival impulse that unites these disparate referential systems is rooted in a rigorous, quasi-forensic interest in how images are made, and how the world is constituted by images, in both a symbolic and literal, bodily sense. Shearer’s abiding interest is in making artworks that explore how we remember and idealise each other — in the romance of retrospection.
The paintings and drawings in My Moody Muse reflect Shearer’s commitment to exploring the variable, unfixed nature of images and the technologies that mediate our reception of them. Having amassed his archive for decades, he has also experimented with evolving technologies that have over time changed how we aggregate, manipulate, and ultimately experience images. Shearer incorporates this inorganic trajectory and these foundational images into his practice: with the acceleration of such tools as 3D modelling and AI text-to-image randomisers, he allows himself to be steered not only by the compositional propositions that are generated by algorithms but also by ideas that arise in the traditional studio environment.
As the artist observes, “[Paintings] start to generate their own subject matter. I’m not looking for pictures in general the way I did initially. Now it’s directed by whatever starts to happen as the paintings develop. I’d recall a face, whether it’s in my archive, or in a painting, or something that’s not in my archive, and then I’d search for that particular face or idea. The associations that come up while I’m working are what directs the image searching.”¹
In rendering “portraits without a sitter,” Shearer draws from this extensive archive of images to create uncanny likenesses that oscillate between fantasy and reality while summoning a trove of familiar ghosts from both an embodied history of modern painting and his own body of work. The artist again pays homage to Birdy, a character that he initially based on a number of photographs from a hair fetish fansite, the images of a man modelling as his own muse and trying different hairstyles. Birdy has featured in a series of red crayon drawings and an oil painting in 2005, the painting Birdy Boy (2019), and The Moody Muse from 2025, the lattermost of which is exhibited here. To create The Moody Muse, Shearer revisited the original found photographs, his own iterations, and an image generated by the AI model Stable Diffusion, imbuing the resulting composition with the weight that all of these images have accumulated since inception.
The Wizzer (2026), Shearer’s largest painting to date, presents a long-haired figure in a narrow doorway arch. Its composition and title echo Shearer’s 2021 painting Wizard, in which the same character urinates into a corner while looking outward at the viewer. Under a spare brick frame, Shearer paints an odd kind of religious scene that conjures the composition of The Outcast (c. 1496; Pallavicini Collection, Rome) from Sandro Botticelli’s series of six panels known as Scenes from the Story of Esther. The character’s pallid skin harks back to the flesh of dying saints, the multicoloured crutches perhaps a pair of broken angel’s wings.
PoCo Rococo (2025) pairs the art historical and the autobiographical in its title: PoCo is a diminutive of Port Coquitlam, the Vancouver suburb where Shearer grew up. The “sitter” here is clothed in a graphic T-shirt; a small spectral figure appears in the bottom right corner, like a depiction of a baby angel in a mannerist painting. Though appearing contemporary, The Wizzer and PoCo Rococo possess qualities of the artist’s previously rendered representations as well as shifts in perspectives that may elude present viewers.
The works on loan to My Moody Muse — Manfred in Character (2022), The Polychromist’s Lament (2023), and The Underground Exhibitor (2024) — feature another of the artist’s signature characters, seen throughout Shearer’s oeuvre and the related painting Morning Fantasist (2022). The figure is based on an image of an obscure pop idol from Germany named Manfred Finger, whom Shearer first encountered in a found fold-up poster and subsequently transformed into various guises in his preparatory drawings and through experimental rendering programs. In these exhibited paintings, Shearer composes Manfred as a long-haired androgynous man in Italian Renaissance–styled portraits, as the sculptural bust of a head in an artist’s studio, and a bare-chested individual in jeans in front of a swirling, psychedelically coloured backdrop. Though Manfred recurs across these works as a somewhat recognisable form, Shearer regards the figure as more of a situation that can be isolated and recombined with other elements, reinterpreted across different temporalities and environments anew.
Steven Shearer (b. 1968) was born in New Westminster, Canada, and earned his BFA in 1992 from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work.
The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. A solo presentation of Shearer’s work, Sleep, Death’s Own Brother, was on view at The George Economou Collection, Athens, in 2024. The exhibition coincided with the release of a major monograph on the artist’s work, Steven Shearer: Working from Life, which was published by DCV with an essay by Dieter Roelstraete.
In 2016, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, hosted a retrospective that included paintings, drawings, collages, and poems by the artist. A comprehensive monograph, which includes a fictional interview with the artist by author Jim Lewis, accompanied the exhibition.
In 2011, Shearer represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale with the exhibition Exhume to Consume, the title of which was taken from the 1989 song by British metal band Carcass. The presentation included a mural-sized work from his Poems series set upon a multi-storey façade that fully obscured the Canadian Pavilion.
Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer, a two-person exhibition, was on view at the New Museum, New York, in 2008, before travelling to MUCA Gallery at the University Museum of Arts and Sciences, Mexico City. Earlier solo presentations of Shearer’s work were held at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2007); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom (2007); and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2004).
In 2024, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, Profaned Travelers, was held at David Zwirner, New York, marking his first exhibition with the gallery.
Shearer’s work is included in prominent museum and public collections worldwide, among them the Kunsthaus Zürich; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; M HKA – Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Rubell Museum, Miami; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Shearer’s work is currently on view in The Only True Protest Is Beauty at Fondazione Dries Van Noten, Venice, through 4 October 2026.
Notes
1. Steven Shearer, in conversation with Robert Enright, “Figures and Faces: The Phrenological Times Machines of Steven Shearer,” Border Crossings 40, no. 3, January 2022, p. 30.
