#steven shearer

[oncanvas]

Stairs, Steven Shearer, 2016

Ink, oil, and oil pastel in two parts 89 ¼ x 37 ¼ in. (226.7 x 94.6 cm)

[viviseconds]

Steven Shearer Gylve, 2010 Oil on xerox 8 1/2 x 11 in

[infinitemercy]

Steven Shearer (b. 1968, New Westminster, Canada), Blackhearts, 2006

[strathshepard]

Steven Shearer Profaned Travelers at David Zwirner

[oldsardens]

Steven Shearer - Bastu

[srvphm]

Steven Shearer — Poem IV (2005)

[malevolentstrains]

[craigpettman]

Dead Ghosts Hippie Flippin' Album Design, 2024 Ink on cardstock, paper and vinyl 12 1/4 x 12 1/4" Gatefold artwork Steven Shearer, Toilet Stand Sleeve photo Kevin Romaniuk

[ebola-soup]

Steven Shearer at David Zwirner

[michaelamccann]

Steven Shearer

Known for his melancholic portraiture and socially insightful photo collage works, Steven Shearer sheds an ironic and critical light on youth culture. In Owls Butterflies Corpsepaint (2002), for example, he juxtaposes pictures of punk rock musicians and concertgoers against several images of owls, animals associated with wisdom and vigilance. Shearer’s work is often anthropologically oriented and has been described as a representation of cultural detritus. In his pastel and painted portraits, Shearer depicts his subjects in a curvilinear style recalling that of Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

For over 20 years, Steven Shearer has worked with a wide range of materials including, print, sculpture, painting, drawing, and collaged found photography. Shearer has become increasingly well known for his adept portraits of figures painted within interior spaces. These portraits recall figures from past music subcultures and art historical paintings and are rendered employing stylistic references from Fauvism and Symbolism to German Romantic Art. Reconfiguring Renaissance systems of perspective, he creates complex perspectival elements within the compositions that animate the viewer’s engagement with his paintings. Steven Shearer is best known for his oil paintings of white men from various subcultures – metalheads, punks, skids, hippies – reminiscent of symbolist and pre-Raphaelite styles, such as those of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but rendered instead in vivid, psychedelic colours. However, Shearer’s current survey at The Polygon – a non-collecting institution in North Vancouver that exhibits lens-based practices – surfaces another important element of the artist’s work: photography. While there are a few examples of Shearer’s more customary drawings and paintings of male figures, the show highlights parts of his practice that deepen and inform those works: collages, sculptures, artists’ books, inkjet paintings and photographs.

Interview:

[oncanvas]

The Collector's Visit, Steven Shearer, 2019

Oil on linen over panel 19 ½ x 22 in. (49.5 x 55.9 cm)

[viviseconds]

Installation view, David Zwirner: 30 Years, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2024 From left: Steven Shearer The Underground Exhibitor, 2024 Oil on canvas, artist’s frame 67 5/8 x 49 ½ in Andra Ursuţa Predators 'R Us, 2022 Lead crystal 29 x 27 x 52 inches Noah Davis Untitled, 2015 Oil on canvas 72 x 96 inches

[artdepo]

Steven Shearer

Lumpen

[punksvspreps]

Steven Shearer

[filmnoirfoundation]

Today at #TCMFF, FNF prez  Eddie Muller will be discussing THE RED SHOES with film director Ernest Dickerson prior to its screening, 11:45 am at the TCL Chinese Theatres House 6.

TCMFF film notes:

For decades, young women have been inspired to study ballet by this elegant, romantic depiction of the life of a classical dancer. What started in the 1930s as a biography of Nijinsky for Alexander Korda and a vehicle for his wife, Merle Oberon, eventually became the crowning glory of the Archers, the production company founded by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The latter had been hired to write Korda’s Nijinsky film and was guided toward Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Red Shoes” as possible inspiration. When World War II delayed production and the Kordas’ divorce ended the project altogether, Pressburger bought the rights to his own work and slated it to follow a string of hits he had made with Powell, most recently Black Narcissus (1947).

By that point, the Nijinsky biopic had been forgotten, but the dancer’s mentor, Sergei Diaghilev, served as inspiration for one of the film’s central characters: the tyrannical impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who refuses to allow his dancers to marry on artistic principle. He has two protégés in the film, the composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) and the young ballerina Victoria Page (Moira Shearer). He commissions Craster to write a ballet based on “The Red Shoes” and gives the leading role to Page, setting the stage for a conflict in which Page is torn between her career and her love for the young composer.

With its climactic 20-minute ballet, the film had a tremendous influence on other filmmakers, most notably Gene Kelly, who used it as inspiration for his own ballet in An American in Paris (1951). The Red Shoes’s expressive use of Technicolor (shot by Jack Cardiff) and music (by Brian Easdale) inspired generations of filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola. The picture even created a fashion trend. In the ‘60s, the Italian glitterati aped Lermontov’s practice of wearing dark glasses constantly, even indoors, a character trait Powell and Pressburger had picked up from Walbrook himself.

d. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 135 minutes, DCP

Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in association with the British Film Institute, The Film Foundation, ITV Global Entertainment, Ltd. and Janus Films. Preservation funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, The Film Foundation and the Louis B. Mayer FoundationCourtesy of MGM and Park Circus LLC

75TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENING