A Point Between the Eyes

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present Peter Shear: A Point Between the Eyes, at our Germantown gallery.

Self-taught artist Peter Shear’s paintings resist swift classification, instead fluently conversing with established dialects of abstraction, figuration, or, more precisely, the space between.

Working predominantly at an intimate scale – Shear’s oil-on-canvas images range from 11 × 14 in. to 30 × 30 in. – the artist engages with essentials, planes of color, schematic marks, loosely defined geometries. These components, minimal but never dogmatically minimalistic, create modular compositions that are, at their core, “propositions.” Each such “proposition” reads like a poetic verse or thought paused mid-formation, hovering between familiarity and estrangement. Through this aesthetic of suspension, and modular approach, paths of engagement emerge, encouraging personal associations, forging an economy where the viewer-painting relation becomes central to the work’s design.

The artist’s palettes span faint tonalities and jolts of saturated, contrasting color, while generating a spontaneity underwritten by an intense, almost devotional engagement with painting itself. Shear has spent years studying art, assiduously examining ways of showing and reconsidering past masters and visual cultures. Through this ever-evolving process, his paintings dialogue with shifting perceptions and forms altered by context. His work draws on the concision and fragmentation of poets like Emily Dickinson and John Ashbery while evoking the gestural abstraction of painters such as Joan Mitchell. Such currents unfold in his attention to compression, fragmentation, and the emotional charge of abbreviated form.

Shear began painting in the mid-to-late 1990s, a moment in abstract painting that remained guarded with respect to proprietary styles. In contrast to abstraction’s long-lived proprietary climate, he has chosen not to dictate how his images are consumed or diffused, openly reflecting on the digital age’s “glut of images” and exploiting the feedback loops it generates. His longstanding fascination with grids, partially rooted in early experiences with layout and graphic design, underscores how geometry resonates differently for each viewer: “Everyone has their unique relationship to a triangle or square or grid.” Yet, simultaneously, the artist values uninterrupted creative clarity, waking early each day to paint with a clear, alert mind – a purposeful break from digital noise, or rather, a controlled exposure to it.

Painting, for Shear, is about “activating the surface,” and in this sense, success, he feels, is when a painting “gets away” from him, embodying a departure from preconceived intention and an attraction to the power to surprise, irritate, or frustrate. He sometimes photographs works, returning to them later – viewing pieces from a remove to resolve compositional tensions as part of a scrutinizing process: “What’s really thrilling is I am addressing myself to the future and present in conversation with the past.”

In Time Change (2024), a pale gray form arcs into a lavender field, simultaneously anchored and afloat. The shape suggests shadow or volume without fully committing to either, suspended between object and atmosphere. Here, the artist allows viewers to hover in moments where spatial logic is teased yet unresolved. Meanwhile, Zoning (2024), challenges the graphical neatness of many works presented in A Point Between the Eyes. A nearly monochrome field is disrupted by a looping, low-slung line – simultaneously contour and shadow. In such works, Shear highlights volatility, a stylistic tendency to slip, glitch, and recombine. One composition evokes high modernism’s rigor, another captures bred-in-the-bone sensations of velocity or stillness. In Blackbird (2025) pale greens and grays shift subtly across the surface. Without a determined focal point, the painting pulses quietly, attuned to weather or memory. Embodying a diverging approach, Classic Car (2025) presents a centered teal form, part glyph, part negative space, against a pinkish back- or fore- ground, creating a visual pause or leap. What’s classic here is not an object but a provisional, recursive way of looking.

Inviting engagement instead of revelation, together, Shear’s works offer something decisively softer, kinetic, fugitive.

Peter Shear (b. 1980, Beverly Farms, USA) lives and works in Bloomington.

Recent solo exhibitions include Reality Show, Blum, Los Angeles (2024); Following Sea, Cheim and Read, New Yoek (2023); Peter Shear: Empty Boat, Koki Arts, Tokyo (2021); Time Stamp, Herron School of Art + Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis (2019).

Recent group exhibitions include 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); Regarding Kimber, Cheim & Read, New York (2022); Small Paintings, Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2022); 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition, Koki Arts, Tokyo (2022); Zwang, C.G. Boerner, New York (2020); A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art, New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford (2021); Adrian, George, Peter, Sofia e Tamina, P420 Arte Contemporanea, Bologna (2019); Locus Focus: Peter Shear and Arvind Sundararajan, 840 Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati (2018); Winter Show, Koki Arts, Tokyo (2018); and Basic Instinct: Peter Shear and Ellen Siebers, FJORD, Philadelphia (2016).