Vancouver artist Steven Shearer’s career is being coloured with a significant accolade.
On Wednesday, Shearer was named the 2026 recipient of the $100,000 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts.
The award honours more than three decades of an acclaimed career shaped from his Vancouver studio and exhibited around the world, according to a statement from the Audain organization.
“Shearer is celebrated for a distinctive practice built around his obsessive engagement with images that involves the collection and transformation of material drawn from art history, heavy metal, popular culture, youth subcultures and the vast visual archive of the internet,” reads a press release. “For more than [30] years he has mined both the overlooked and the familiar — from nameless characters and famous musicians to toolsheds and everyday ephemera — and revitalized them through painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and collage.
“This continuous juxtaposition of high and low culture has become a defining feature of Shearer’s work, one that reveals the unexpected emotional and cultural weight within both the humdrum and extraordinary images that surround us,” the statement continues.
Shearer says some of the best paintings he’s done have elements that are “awkward or misshapen” but balanced by something articulated and attractive.
“I’ve always thought that painting for me was the culmination of everything I do. 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 ag over again each time. There is always a level of challenge that you can bring to it that keeps it interesting.”
Weaving together German Romantics and heavy metal
Shearer’s career is marked by artistic achievement.
In 1992, he graduated with a bachelor of fine arts from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design. In 2011, Shearer represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale and his pieces have since been exhibited by top galleries around the world.
Those include: The Tate Modern in London (2005), the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2005), the Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich (2005 to 2021) and the David Zwirner in New York (2024). In Canada, The Polygon Gallery (2021), the Power Plant (2007) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (1996) have shown exhibits of his work.
The Audain prize is selected by an independent committee to celebrate outstanding achievement in B.C.’s visual arts and reflects The Audain Foundation’s commitment to championing Canadian artists at home and abroad, according to the organization.
Past recipients of the prize include Rebecca Belmore, Dana Claxton, Stan Douglas, Gathie Falk, James Hart, Fred Herzog, Carole Itter, Brian Jungen, Michael Morris, Susan Point, Gordon Smith, Takao Tanabe, Ian Wallace and Paul Wong.
“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,” says Emmy Lee Wall, member of the 2026 selection committee and executive director of Capture Photography Festival.
Wednesday’s award ceremony was held at the Fairmont Hotel, marking 23 years since the prize was first established by arts patron Michael Audain.
