Steven Shearer Wins Canada's $71,000 Audain Prize

Steven Shearer, a Vancouver-based painter who binds historically inclined portraiture to haunting contemporary sensibilities, has won Canada's Audain Prize, worth $100,000 Canadian — around $71,000 US.

The annual award is dedicated to British Columbia–based artists and is reserved, per its mandate, for "a senior artist in recognition of their outstanding contributions to Canadian art." Last year's recipient was Brian Jungen.

A selection committee of five curators chooses the winner. This year's jurors came from institutions including the Audain Art Museum, the Capture Photography Festival, the Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum at Simon Fraser University, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Shearer's practice extends well beyond painting. He works in drawing, sculpture, photography, printmaking and collage, and the Audain Prize citation says his output is "distinguished by an expansive engagement with images and objects drawn from both art history and everyday visual culture, bringing together seemingly disparate references including heavy metal, popular culture, youth subcultures, vernacular imagery and the internet."

He is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber and David Zwirner.

The prize also pulls one of Canada's most private artists a step closer to public view. As the Globe and Mail reported, "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."

Shearer has long preferred to let the work speak. In an interview with the Guardian earlier this year, ahead of a London show at Zwirner, he said: "I wrote down lots of potential things to say, but it's not my nature. All the hope or will to be able to communicate kind of goes into the pictures. And I try to stay out of the way once that's happened."

The Guardian's Eddy Frankel, who wrote the profile, likened Shearer's work to "Edvard Munch high on potent weed, or the fauvists drinking cheap cider in the woods behind school."

In a conversation with fashion designer Raf Simons for Interview magazine published in June, Shearer described the volatile interior life behind his studio output. "I have ways in the studio of channeling my antisocial energies," he told Simons. "I used to slash the paintings and destroy them. Now I just do other things, and the paintings survive."

The award places Shearer, at 51, in the company of previous winners such as Jungen and cements his standing as one of British Columbia's defining painters — one whose canvases now carry the imprimatur of five of the province's leading curators.