Sean Landers
-
Biography
Born 1962 in Palmer, MA
Lives and works in New York
Sean Landers is a painter and multimedia artist whose work spans a wide breadth of subjects, most coming from his own personal experience. His stream of consciousness textual outpourings together with recurring figurative motifs touch on existential themes and truths about contemporary society and humanity. Across all mediums, his oeuvre provides a visualization of thoughts — executed in a humorous and confessional way, Landers’ work blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, and between fact and fiction.
Landers‘ work has been shown extensively for over three decades, with solo and group exhibitions at Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Kunsthalle Zürich; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Musée Magritte, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; New Museum, New York; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Serpentine Gallery, London and MoMA PS1, New York.
His work is held in public collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris; Des Moines Art Center; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, among others.
-
-
-
-
When I first tried painting the ocean in the early 1990s [...] it was quite difficult to do even though I was at the beach in Amagansett, NY, looking at the ocean every day. So I turned to the American painter Winslow Homer to learn from. This dog and ocean series was based on him.
-Sean Landers
-
-
Works
Sean Landers
Lion in Winter, 2019Oil on linenSigned and dated verso177.8 x 132.1 cm
70 x 52 inches
Installation view "Sean Landers Animal Kingdom", Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, 2023/2024B-SLANDERS-.20-0002Sean Landers paints animals whose coats are replaced with textural, unexpected motifs, in a direct reference to the surrealist René Magritte and his “Période Vache”, which symbolizes to Landers “total...Sean Landers paints animals whose coats are replaced with textural, unexpected motifs, in a direct reference to the surrealist René Magritte and his “Période Vache”, which symbolizes to Landers “total artistic freedom”. Woodgrain is a recurring motif in the artist’s work, used in unconventional ways, forming for example the coat of the wild cat in Lion in Winter. The surrealist effect is enhanced by depicting the animal removed from its natural habitat into a snowy landscape. Landers’ paintings also negotiate the visual relationships between language and image, in that his animal patterns play with the visual metonymic phrase “to coat.” The phrase can be used in the sense of “applying a coat of paint”, just as it can refer to the natural fur of an animal. Thus, through the hand of the artist, each animal receives a freshly painted coat of fur.Exhibitions
Sean Landers, Consortium Museum, Dijon, Mar 13-Oct 18, 2020.
Sean Landers Animal Kingdom, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, 2023/2024
Publications
Animal Kingdom. Sean Landers, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, LIENART éditions, Paris, 2023, p. 81ExhibitionsExternal ExhibitionsNewsPressPublicationsVideo