Steven Shearer: Bricks Boy, 2026

Canadian artist Steven Shearer’s (b. 1968) practice weds canonical art history to the contemporary moment. Bricks Boy (2026)—a significant painting included in the artist's current exhibition My Moody Muse, at David Zwirner London through July 31, 2026—reflects Shearer’s enduring interest in how we remember and idealize one another through the romance of retrospection. In rendering what he calls "portraits without a sitter," Shearer draws on his vast archive of images to create uncanny likenesses that oscillate between fantasy and reality, summoning familiar ghosts from both the history of modern painting and his own oeuvre. 
 
A major solo exhibition of Shearer's work will open at the Aspen Art Museum in summer 2027.

Shearer’s work synthesizes a broad range of references, aggregating sources that range from metalheads and teen idols to the proto-modernist archetypes of Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the ambiguously gendered figures of the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, and Renaissance masters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Domenico Ghirlandaio. The archival impulse that unites these disparate referential systems is rooted in a rigorous, quasi-forensic inquiry into how images are made—and how the world itself is constituted through images, both symbolically and in a literal, bodily sense.

Shearer has experimented with evolving technologies that have over time changed how we aggregate, manipulate, and ultimately experience images. The artist incorporates this inorganic trajectory and these foundational images into his practice: with the acceleration of such tools as 3D modeling and AI text-to-image randomizers, he allows himself to be steered not only by the compositional propositions that are generated by algorithms but also by ideas that arise in the traditional studio environment.