ART CITIES:Zurich-Steven Shearer
Steven Shearer’s subject matter typically focuses on the world of his upbringing: suburban and rural working-class youth culture, in particular the iconography of heavy metal and 1970s teen idols. In Shearer’s hands, such iconography becomes a deliberate reference to art-historical works and their bohemian subjects, from Albrecht Dürer’s to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive
Steven Shearer’s breakthrough year was 2007, when London’s Ikon Gallery gave him his first major European-institution exhibition, Curated by Nigel Prince. The show later moved to Toronto’s Power Plant. In 2011, Shearer represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, where he showed a retrospective of his paintings and drawings, as well as a large text-based work outside the pavilion, part of a series of works extrapolating lyrics from heavy-metal songs. The works of his solo exhibition “Printed works” at Galerie Eva Presenhuber can be understood as an extension of the artist’s interest in figurative painting as the scale, rhythm and figure/ground relationships of the compositions are approached with a painterly sensibility. The exhibition focuses on Shearer’s work with images taken directly from the artist’s archive. Although all these pictures were made for publication in zines or on the internet, they were rarely if ever professionally staged. In the ‘70s the marketability of subcultures was not yet fully explored respectively established, a fact that links these often self-made zines to today’s jpgs culled from the internet, where pictures are published beyond any commercial use. The silk-screens of “Geometric Healing no. 4” illuminate how close Shearer‘s work is to pop. He brings together the high and the low. But in contrary to historical Pop-Art, Shearer doesn’t reproduce the icons of the mainstream. The images in this work were found in educational books for creating positive tactile experiences for children through craftwork. The children would be given visual cues in the form of modern art to try and direct them to a more orderly and “positive” direction. For the artist, there is a play in the work between a kind of vulgar modernism in the flatness of the mechanical reproduction of the design and the lost texture and layering of the original compositions made with discarded fabrics. The work also plays with the idea of decorative vs functional forms with the assemblages and their colored grounds alternating between garish and subtle and compositions that appear to be unselfconscious or highly stylized. “Wrong Reflection”, though not silk-screened, shares this overall impression. Combining snapshots of rather private appearance, also taken from his archive, Shearer once again focuses on recontextualizing rebellious, ephemeral culture. Although the connection between the single pictures is not always clear, one gets the overall impression of a distinct whole. In works like the triptych “Sleep II”, the connection is more obvious: sleeping people. Despite their sheer quantity – nearly 2500 images from Shearer’s collection of approximately of 7000 images – and their differences regarding formal features, the pictures are arranged with each one within the clear frame of a white border, underlining their respective integrity as individual pictures. Taking a closer look at this flood of pictures raises questions. No one here is in a usual sleeping position. So why are they asleep? Or did they pass out? The delicate mysteriousness of the pictures is created by the fact that they echo the figuration found in religious painting and sculpture. The orientation of many images have been rotated to create the subtle effect of the figures bodies defining gravity or released of their earthly bonds. “Xmas trees III” shows a collection of Christmas trees that Shearer connects to his oeuvre with a single gesture: The Christian symbol is inverted. A single flip creates a rebellious attitude within a motif that represents what might be understood as the center of the Christian core-family.
Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zahnradstrasse 21, Maag Areal, Zurich, Duration: 2/9-14/10/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com