Curator Dieter Roelstraete on Steven Shearer's Paintings

Steven Shearer's adept and increasingly haunting portraits have gained worldwide renown. The Vancouver-based artist shows regularly at commercial galleries including Galerie Eva Presenhuber. He represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and at the 4th Canadian Biennial in 2017.

Now, the George Economou Collection is host to Steven Shearer: Sleep, Death's Own Brother (18 June 2023–30 March 2024), an exhibition of paintings and printed works held in the Athens-based collection.

Ahead of the opening, curator Dieter Roelstraete spoke to Ocula Advisory about the Shearer's transgressive perspective of the lifeless body, the decision to spotlight his practice now, and the works on show in Athens.

How did you get involved in this exhibition?

I was invited by Skarlet Smatana, of the George Economou Collection, to curate the show, in part upon the artist's recommendation.

I first met Steven Shearer in Vancouver in 2004 and have been following his work closely ever since. I have written about it on many occasions, most recently in the context of Steven's first major monograph in some time, published by DCV. I'd say I fancy myself a bit of a Shearer scholar.

The show takes Steven's 2015 work, Sleep II (2015) as its point of departure. Why?

The exhibition is primarily focused on Steven's painterly work, but we thought it important to consider the broad expanse of the artist's formal interests across various media, and felt it wise to include at least one example of his digital collages.

The George Economou Collection just so happens to hold one particularly spectacular example of this strand within his work, which is the giant three-part digital photo-collage called Sleep II, made up of thousands of jpegs of people asleep.

This is of course a question that should be asked of George Economou and Skarlet Smatana first and foremost, but I certainly think Steven's work, which remains relatively little known in Europe, is wholly worthy of the honour.

Considering the artist's pervasive interest in the morbid iconography of certain subcultures, we used this work as a prism through which to consider the 'brotherhood of sleep and death', a line from Hesiod's Theogony and the title of the show.

The works on show are held in the George Economou Collection, amongst other international heavyweights—Louise Bourgeois, Georg Baselitz, and Martin Kippenberger. Why spotlight Steven Shearer, and why now?

He is one of the most accomplished and imaginative artists working in the field of figurative painting at present, and some of the topics that his work touches upon, such as the aesthetics of androgyny and the conundrum of privacy in our scopophilic [or voyeuristic] world, are at the heart of current cultural debates.

It is all the more notable that these concerns have been at the forefront of Steven's practice for two decades now—some of his works have acquired a prophetic cast in retrospect.

What works should we expect to see in the show?

Besides Sleep II, the focus of the exhibition is squarely on Steven's painting, and the show features a number of highly original 'fictional' portraits. However, the exhibition also includes two major monumental paintings that are among the most complex produced by the artist in a quarter-century career, as well as a rich sampling of drawings.

In most of the work you can get an overwhelming sense of the depth of the artist's imaging sources, from Netherlandish Old Masters to fin-de-siècle-styled symbolism and Weimar-era Neue Sachlichkeit. Some original examples of which—taken from the Economou Collection—are included in the exhibition as an art-historical aside.

The exhibition revolves around the uneasy proximity between death and sleep. Curatorially, how did you approach this?

We made a selection of works that we felt expanded on the morbid undertones of Sleep II, which revolves around a classic quality of the 'uncanny'; the uncertainty whether something or someone seemingly alive might in fact be dead, or whether something seemingly lifeless might in fact be alive.

If you're familiar with Steven Shearer's work, it is not hard to find works that play with this disorienting ambiguity: his work is full of the living dead, so to speak, of chimaeras and spectres, revenants and zombies.

Like many of his paintings, The Green Collector (2021), hung at the entrance of the show, is exquisite and mesmerising yet somewhat haunting. Could you talk about this work and how it sets the tone for the exhibition more broadly.

Haunting is right and that's of course just another way of capturing the artist's interest in the uncanny, in ambiguities, and ambivalences of all kinds. Of course, we felt it somehow appropriate to hang a small portrait titled The Green Collector at the entrance of an exhibition that affords a glance in a private collector's aesthetic universe (his 'haunts').

But the programmatic quality of this particular painting is a function, for sure, of its unsettling allusion to the porous boundaries between living subject and what French art theory so poignantly names nature morte. And that all these images conjure what you might call a dreamlike state returns us to the enigma of sleep. —[O]