Steven Shearer Awarded the Audain Prize for Visual Arts

Steven Shearer is the 2026 recipient of the $100,000 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts, honouring more than three decades of an acclaimed career shaped from his Vancouver studio and exhibited around the world.

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. For more than thirty years he has mined both the overlooked and the familiar—from nameless characters and famous musicians to toolsheds and everyday ephemera—and revitalised 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 artist’s selection for the 2026 Audain Prize recognizes a remarkable career marked by unrelenting artistic achievement. Since emerging from Vancouver’s art scene—graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992 from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design—Shearer has acquired an individual body of work that has garnered him a place on the international stage. In 2011, Shearer represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale and his pieces have since been exhibited by leading galleries and institutions around the world. The Tate Modern in London (2005), the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2005), the Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich (2005–2021), and the David Zwirner in New York (2024) have all exhibited Shearer’s unorthodox and eclectic works. In Canada, the Polygon Gallery (2021), the Power Plant (2007) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (1996) presented exhibitions of his works, in addition to the many works included in public and private collections across the country.

Selected by an independent committee and presented by the Audain Art Museum, the Audain Prize celebrates outstanding achievement in British Columbia’s visual arts and reflects the Audain Foundation’s commitment to championing Canadian artists at home and abroad. Past recipients of the prestigious 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.