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Artist Steven Shearer is awarded the $100,000 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts in Vancouver on Wednesday.JEFF VINNICK/The Canadian Press
Steven Shearer, the Vancouver artist whose work spans painted portraits, photo collage and online images of people sleeping, has won one of Canada’s top art prizes.
Shearer made a rare public appearance Wednesday to accept the $100,000 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts, which goes to a British Columbia-based artist.
Shearer is a darling of the art world whose work is praised for blending references that span centuries into a commentary on art itself. There’s also a mythos that surrounds him: he’s often described as being somewhat reclusive.
Until now, he said in a video shared by the Audain Prize that does not show his face, no photos of him have been shared online.
“I’ve never intended to not have images of me on the internet and stuff, but that’s just how it’s worked out. It’s just the dynamic that’s built up over years and years. That’s what I’m comfortable doing,” he said in the video.
But on Wednesday, he accepted the award in person and had his photo taken by assembled journalists.
He didn’t deliver remarks at the event, instead opting for one-on-one, off-camera interviews with journalists in the room.
Shearer works in multiple media, including paintings that meld modern subjects – men with long hair or painted nails, wearing accoutrements of various subcultures – with a more traditional style.
In presenting the award, Josée Drouin-Brisebois, director of national engagement at the National Gallery of Canada, praised Shearer’s “unique unapologetic voice that continues to distinguish itself both at home and abroad.”
Shearer has “encouraged us to see the world differently, to consider connections through time between the ways artists have expressed themselves at various moments in history and the images that surround us today,” she said.
Shearer has also put on exhibitions of found imagery – specifically, photos of people sleeping that he’s found online, which he manipulates and enlarges to a massive scale, sometimes as tall as a gallery wall.
In 2011, Shearer’s work was chosen to represent Canada in the Venice Biennale. The solo exhibition included paintings, drawings and a sculpture, as well as what his representative called “a nine-meter-high free-standing mural in response to the architecture of the adjacent British and German Pavilions.”
The Audain Prize winner is chosen by an independent committee and presented by the Audain Art Museum.
It was founded in 2004, and in 2019 the purse increased from $30,000 to $100,000.
Last year’s winner was Brian Jungen.