Wednesday, October 14 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Chazen Auditorium
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Peter Shear (b. 1980, Beverly Farms, MA) is best known for small-format canvases that resist classification, fixed formulae, or repetition. As a painter, he has staked out a position that uncouples abstract painting from the inheritance of established idioms, offering an exploratory approach and an alternative to dogma and orthodoxy. Working with essentials—planes of color, schematic marks, loosely defined shapes, provisional geometries—his paintings inhabit the space between abstraction and legibility, suspending recognition without resolving it.
His brushwork shifts from thick to feathery to dry, while grounds may be flat, stained, built up in layers, or left exposed. “Drawing in paint” is central to the practice—as is observing works from a distance, returning over time to work through compositional tensions. Without yielding to overt “pattern seeking” or insistent “expressionism,” the works draw viewers close through an economy of means. In this regard, Shear shares ground with painters like Thomas Nozkowski, Raoul de Keyser, and Ilse D’Hollander, artists who turned away from grand gestures toward quieter, more searching engagements with the medium.
A forthcoming exhibition of new work will be held in São Paulo with Mendes Wood DM in November 2026. Recent solo exhibitions include Slipway, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2026); The Company, Denison University, Granville (2026); A Point Between the Eyes, Mendes Wood DM, Germantown (2025); Accident Report, American Art Catalogs, New York (2024); Reality Show, Blum, Los Angeles (2024); Following Sea, Cheim & Read, New York (2023); The Cat Came Back, Castle, Los Angeles (2022); Peter Shear: Empty Boat, Koki Arts, Tokyo (2021); Recording, Fortnight Institute, New York (2021); and Time Stamp, Herron School of Art + Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis (2019).
Recent group exhibitions include Surface and Signal, Blum, Tokyo (2025); Breath, Art Cake, Brooklyn (2025); Find and Keep: Janine Iversen and Peter Shear, CLEARING, New York (2024); The Wrong Tree, dunes.fyi, Portland (2024); The Feminine in Abstract Painting, Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York (2023); Real Life, Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp (2023); Things Seen, Make Room, Los Angeles (2023); A Game for the Living, dunes.fyi, Portland (2023); The Sense of Sight: Landscape, the City, and Abstraction, Make Room, Los Angeles (2023); Regarding Kimber, Cheim & Read, New York (2022); Small Paintings, Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2022); 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition, Koki Arts, Tokyo (2022); Beyond Genres, Outsider Art Fair, New York (2022); Angle of Repose, Poker Flats Gallery, Williamstown (2021); A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art, New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford (2021); Zwang, C.G. Boerner, New York (2020); and Adrian, George, Peter, Sofia e Tamina, P420 Arte Contemporanea, Bologna (2019).
The 2025 recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting, his work has been written about in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Office Magazine, Hyperallergic, Esse Arts, and Vanity Fair; his artist’s book Accident Report was published in 2024 by American Art Catalogues. He lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.
The facilitator for Shear’s talk Dr. Erica DiBenedetto is a distinguished curator and art historian specializing in art from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Her scholarly and curatorial practice often investigates the intersections of art history with other disciplines, such as anthropology and architecture, to critically examine metaphorical and spatial boundaries. A curator for the Chazen Museum of Art, she formerly served as a curatorial assistant and curatorial associate in the department of painting and sculpture for The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Her most recent work involved traveling to Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, and Zimbabwe to interview artists and access art collections and archives.
DiBenedetto holds doctoral and master’s degrees in art and archaeology from Princeton University, a master’s degree in the history of art from Williams College and a Bachelor of Humanities and Arts with a focus on aesthetics, culture and social process from Carnegie Mellon University. Her writing has been featured in numerous exhibition catalogs, essays, and arts publications.