Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present new works by Canadian artist Steven Shearer in the exhibition Geometric Healing.

Steven Shearer’s works revolve around similar issues in constantly changing forms. His central interest here is a youth subculture committed to heavy metal, that had its start in the 1970s. In so doing, Shearer makes use of the products resulting from the mass movement, such as numerous fan goods, and engages at the same time with the private staging of the individual.

With an almost archival ambition, Steven Shearer is constantly enlarging his private atlas of images, which he then removes from the immense mass of collective image multiplication. In a further step, Shearer responds and reacts to this collection on several media levels. Using the techniques of classical painting, drawing, simple photocopies, or computer-based image editing, the works all possess a great melancholic quality.

In his new large-format works, Shearer uses the classical canvas as a stage for his eternal heroes. The guitar in this series, as earlier as well, becomes a key object, worshipped in a cult-like fashion, and dominates the entire image structure. Freed from its original environment, object and player fuse before the monochromatic backgrounds to form an ideal typical unit. The shaped canvases suggestively follow the movement of the guitar neck and develop their very own dynamics.

The large format sculptural work Improved Geometric Mechanotherapy Cell for Harmonic Alignment of Movements and Relations (2009) finds its origins in the already early depiction of a similar object. If the original version was supposedly intended as a toy—monkey bars for children—it is transformed in Shearer’s reinterpretation into a social utopian construct.

Gleaming, the structure of countless black pipes stands compactly in the space and is rattled at irregular intervals by sonorous bass sounds. Like bowels, according to Steven Shearer, the structure can be imagined as a kind of reservoir for collective-negative energies that are digested inside the labyrinth and catalytically released.

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