Artist: Steven Shearer

David Zwirner presents 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.