Steven Shearer: My Moody Muse

Steven Shearer has long cultivated an aura of mystery around both himself and his work. His figures—drawn from popular and underground culture, art history, memory, fantasy, and now increasingly from synthesized digital processes—rarely offer straightforward readings, and are instead left open to viewers’ interpretations, assumptions, and reflections.

Shearer’s new exhibition at our London gallery brings together a body of paintings that feel unusually exposed in emotional tenor, even as they preserve the artist’s characteristic opacity. If Shearer’s early works often mused on youth and its subcultural expressions, a number of the works gathered here present a notable shift.

Across these new portraits, there is a palpable sense of molting, erosion, and bodily fragility that reflects a deeper reckoning with time and mortality. Shearer’s figures appear caught in states of transformation: faces seem to soften or decay, flesh illuminates as it jaundices, and bodies oscillate between sensuality and ruin.

Some paintings present youthful figures whose beauty feels eternal, almost mythic in its suspension outside of time. Others confront aging more directly, depicting characters who seem burdened by psychic weight, memory, and the inevitability of decline. Together, they form a meditation on impermanence that marks one of the most emotionally resonant developments in the artist’s practice to date.

The Wizzer, Shearer’s largest painting to date, presents a long-haired figure in a narrow doorway arch. Under a spare brick frame, Shearer paints an odd kind of religious scene that conjures the composition of The Outcast from Sandro Botticelli’s Scenes from the Story of Esther, or Alexandre Cabanel’s The Fallen Angel. The character’s pallid skin harks back to the flesh of dying saints, the multicolored crutches perhaps a pair of broken angel’s wings

In The Moody Muse, the artist again pays homage to Birdy, a character that appears in previous works and was initially based on a number of photographs from a hair fetish fansite. To create the work, 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.

Shearer works fluidly between traditional studio methods and algorithmic tools, including 3D modeling and AI image generation. The resulting compositions are painstakingly hand-painted, holding these accelerated processes in tension with the slow discipline of the medium. In this expanded field, not only his own vast image archive but also the deep reservoir of art historical figuration becomes material, serving at once as reference, source, and subject.

Across Shearer’s exhibition, echoes of Old Master painting, Symbolism, Romanticism, underground music culture, and digital image circulation coalesce into figures that feel simultaneously classical and contemporary, familiar and estranged. These synthesized portraits deepen the uncanny quality that has always animated Shearer’s work: images that appear discovered rather than invented, as though emerging from a collective subconscious.

As Shearer describes, the work is increasingly self-generating, guided less by external sourcing than by associations that arise in the process of painting itself. In these “portraits without sitters,” figures materialize from this layered archive, oscillating between the familiar and the imagined while echoing both art historical precedents and his own past work.