Peter Shear

Biography

Utilizing the art of suggestion, Peter Shear (b. 1980, Beverly Farms, MA) loosely renders recognizable forms in distinctive palettes to create paintings that trigger open-ended recognition in their viewers. Drawing inspiration from a range of topics as disparate as the internet is vast, Shear intakes a large quantity of visual information—a single painting may, for instance, be influenced by the oeuvre of Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Leyster, an image of several neatly arranged green Adidas Sambas, a drawing by contemporary British artist David Shrigley, and a news headline that reads “Where’s Princess Kate?” The resulting works broadly deploy intuitively familiar aesthetics to underscore our universally shared connection to the collective unconscious. 

With compositions that alternate between pure abstraction and representational elements, Shear avoids stylistic categorization, instead preferring to respond to and channel the whims of his materials. Activating an interest in the artifice of painting, Shear cross-pollinates devices that span the medium—diffusing mountain-like crests into the prongs of gestural brushstrokes in Land (2023) or playing with depth perception as created by shading a geometric abstraction in Double Sided (2024). By resisting the traditional schools of painting, Shear makes room for a viewer to situate his work amongst any number of subjective things or ideas.

Taking this prompt for individualized interpretation one step further, Shear states that his paintings are meant to encourage viewers to “finish the sentence.” In other words, the intention of each work has been left open-ended in a generous gesture that allows space for personal associations and experiences. In this way, the connection formed between individual and painting is the work’s purpose—each canvas or panel is otherwise left open and free of determination until the next psyche sets out to explore it.

In a post-internet era, Carl Jung’s collective unconscious has materialized in Instagram—this platform has become the well from which much of the population draws their imagery and information. Shear’s work is informed by the manner in which social media impacts our absorption of news. “I think the way that my paintings cycle in and out of themes or argue with each other mimics the Instagram environment—you’re seeing, for instance, a Rothko next to Hypebeast sneakers. The mind tells a story about that, and I’m interested in how people put things together.”

Peter Shear lives and works in Bloomington, IN, and has shown his work across the United States and internationally. Recently, his work was the subject of the solo exhibition Time Stamp at Herron School of Art + Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN (2019). Group exhibitions include The Feminine In Abstract Painting, The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY (2023); A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art, New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA (2021); and Basic Instinct, Peter Shear and Ellen Siebers, FJORD, Philadelphia, PA (2016). 

Selected Works

News

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