Steven Shearer is the recipient of the 2026 Audain Prize, one of Canada’s highest visual arts honours, which comes with a cash prize of C$100,000 ($71,000). Now in its 23rd year, the prize was announced on Wednesday (23 September) in a ceremony in the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, where Shearer was praised for “a remarkable career marked by unrelenting artistic achievement”.
The Vancouver-based multi-disciplinary artist is known for his otherworldly and fantastic portrait paintings and photoconceptualism-influenced images of Generation X-era youth, which juxtapose art historical references with contemporary iconography.
Installation view of Steven Shearer: Profaned Travelers at David Zwirner in New York, 2024 Courtesy David Zwirner
Accepting the award, Shearer spoke about his mother, who attended the former Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design) and his uncle, who studied at Kwantlen Community College—where the young Shearer began his studies after randomly finding the college’s telephone number in the yellow pages. He also sang the praises of the emerging artists who work as his assistants.
“I’ve always thought that painting for me was the culmination of everything I do,” Shearer said in a statement. “All the other works are not sidetracks, but they are a way of building a world for where maybe the subject matter of the paintings come from, and a source of inspiration. Painting, for me, is like starting over again each time. There is always a level of challenge that you can bring to it that keeps it interesting.”
Steven Shearer, Atheist's Commission, 2018 © Steven Shearer. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner.
Asked by The Art Newspaper what he would do with the prize money, Shearer said he would re-invest it in his ever-expanding studio, where he is currently at work on a series of “mystery portraits” painted from his imagination and with the aid of new body-scanning technology.
“Steven Shearer is internationally renowned for the distinct way in which he weaves together canonical art historical references such as Fauvist or German Romantic paintings with contemporary youth subcultures including heavy metal, punk and 1970s glam rock,” said Emmy Lee Wall, a member of the 2026 Audain Prize’s selection committee and the executive director and chief curator of Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival. “His work collapses the traditional hierarchies between ‘high art’ and the vulnerable and aggressive energy of teen rebellion.”
Shearer’s work has been celebrated internationally, in shows from Tate Modern in London (in 2005) to the Venice Biennale, where he represented Canada in 2011. He is represented by David Zwirner (and had solo shows with the gallery in New York in 2024 and London ealier this year) and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, which has held eight solo exhibitions of his work at its locations in Zürich, Seoul and New York over the past 21 years. Next year he will have a solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado.
Steven Shearer, Sleep II, 2015 © Steven Shearer. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner.
However, his work has not always been celebrated in his hometown. In 2021, seven site-specific billboard works by Shearer were commissioned for the Capture Photography Festival. The images of people caught sleeping in public, which simultaneously evoked Pop art and religious Renaissance figure paintings, were the subject of dozens of outraged emails from area residents, some of whom found their exploration of the border between sleep and death unsettling. After being installed along the city’s Arbutus Greenway—a pedestrian and cycling space that also functions as a venue for public art—the works were removed the day before the festival’s official opening, by their sponsor, Pattison Outdoor Advertising, and replaced with stock photography.
Established by the collector and philanthropist Michael Audain in 2004, the Audain Prize is presented annually by the Whistler, British Columbia-based Audain Art Museum, with the aim of “elevating artists from British Columbia”. Past prize-winners are a who’s-who of Western Canada’s contemporary art greats, including Brian Jungen, Rebecca Belmore, Dana Claxton, Ian Wallace and James Hart, among others.
