Background

Sean Landers was born in 1962 in Palmer, Massachusetts, United States. He is a son of Diana George Landers.

Education

Sean Landers received the first lessons in painting from his mother Diana George Landers and grandmother Muriel Brown George, a disciple of the American painter Jonas Joseph LaValley.

Landers obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art (currently the University of the Arts, Philadelphia). It was followed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Art two years later.

Career

The career of Sean Landers can be divided into several periods corresponding to a certain phase of his artistic process.

The first one began in 1990 and lasted till the middle of the decade. During this time, the artist used writing as the main visual media of his autobiographical hand-written works which somehow determined the conceptual content of his further art. 'Art, Life and God', a series of yellow legal pads of paper signed by Landers' alter-ego Chris Hamson who personified a young New York artist in great straits was among the examples. These small-format writing works gave place to larger narrative paintings created on the unstretched linen. All of them reflected the thoughts that came to Landers during the process of their creation.

From the middle of the decade, Sean Landers turned to a more traditional form of pictures taking inspiration from the art of the French avant-garde painter Francis Picabia. Since then, Landers added big doodles to his texts created in a rich color palette. The paintings became more and more imaginative as such symbolic characters as the chimp and clown were featured on the canvases for the first time. Little by little, Landers put the text aside for a while and focused on color instead. As a result, a series of colorful stripe paintings appeared.

By 1996, Sean Landers immersed himself into the world of imagination completely. There were clowns who replaced the text from the foregoing images in its role of the exponent of the artist’s inward and current emotional state that clearly seen in 'Alone'. Another inspiration of the time was 'A Midnight Modern Conversation' by William Hogarth which pushed the artist to create an autobiographical series of thirteen paintings that reflected the process of quitting from the drink-based camaraderie which occupied the important part of the artist's life and the life of his friends. The series has been the most exhibited from the other works of the artist.

That same year, Landers tried himself as an author. His back-page column ‘Genius Lessons’ had been published in Spin magazine till 2000. In 1997, Landers applied a Disney-like cartoon style for several imaginative paintings presenting his psychological portrait.

The following years, Sean Landers has made reference to the well-known conceptual artists like Magritte, Picasso, Duchamp, Dali, De Chirico, Braque, Beckmann, and Ernst either portraying them as clowns or as ghosts or simply creating a series of works that featured the signature traits of their art. In addition, Landers has reshaped a number of his early text works turning them into the spatial abstract canvases.

During the course of his career, Sean Landers have been regularly shown nationally and internationally, including Berlin Biennial, Athens and the Venice Biennale.

Nowadays, the artist lives and works in New York City where he is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The other representatives of his art are China Art Objects in Los Angeles, greengrassi in London, Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, and Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels.

Achievements

• 

  Sean Landers is an accomplished artist whose signature conceptual paintings, videos, and sculptures are widely recognized by the art community.
  
  Landers’ artworks are acquired by many public and private collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Tate Modern, London, Sammlung Hoffman, Berlin, and Fundación/La Colección Jumex, Mexico City.
  
  In 2007, ‘Genius’ by Sean Landers was purchased for $360,000 at Sotheby’s in New York City.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Seal Pup (Chatham, MA)

  • Three-Toed Sloth

  • Panda Cub

  • Baby Gorilla

  • Parenthetical

  • Bobcat Kitten (Grand Canyon, AZ)

  • 19th Century Sailor

  • Painted Desert (Markhor)

  • Panda

  • The Immigrant

  • Moby Dick (Merrilees)

  • Howler Monkey (Casting It Back Out to Sea)

  • Ghost 5 (Kippenberger)

  • Absence of Thought Bubble

  • A Midnight Modern Conversation (Boredom)

  • Drowning

  • The Snowman

  • The Turtle and the Lady Slipper

  • Career Ego

  • Disturbed Eagle

  • Cyclops

  • Ghost 1 (Ernst)

  • Anti-Hero

  • Old Gilligan

  • Around the World Alone (Coxswain Moon)

  • Around the World Alone (Boy Skipper–Dawn)

  • Around the World Alone (Lord of the Seas)

  • Sailor Jack and Bingo

  • Dawn Breaks

  • I'm a Joke? I'm a Joke! I'm a Joke.

  • When Freedom Becomes the Cage and the Cage Becomes Freedom

  • Both Things at Once

  • Plankboy (Daedalus)

  • Old Salt

• sculpture

  • Dedicated to Walter Hudson

  • Bozo

  • Around the World Alone (Lord of the Seas)

Views

Sean Landers adapted the performative character to his works since the very beginning of his artistic path.

According to him, the text assumed the role of the image in his early and subsequent writing paintings. Landers’ installations consisting of paintings, their sculptural replicas and video, attach the new sense to the perception of the multi-media proposing to consider the freestanding objects as the integrant parts of the whole.

A couple of the characters essential to many of Landers’ works, the chimp and the clown, personify the self-aggrandizement and the self-abasement of his writing respectively.

Quotations: "That’s behind my impulse to make art. I wanted it to last, to outlast me."

"When I saw the magnetism of the writing, it became the material with which I could work."

"I knew that was why people would endure aching feet to read my art, because while staring into my open soul they were actually evaluating themselves. I think this is a fundamental component of the unspoken communication between art and viewer."

"Painting someone as a clown is putting them in my pantheon, you know? It’s not an insult. Painting them as a ghost is similar. So I was communicating with Max Ernst, and Picabia. But there was another level, too. What I like about the Surrealists is that they are guys who would sit in front of a blank canvas and allow their stream-of-consciousness to in some way fill the emptiness. Which is exactly what I am doing when I fill a giant empty white canvas with text...but in a different way."

Interests

• Artists

  Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Braque, Max Ernst

Connections

Sean Landers is married to Michelle Reyes Landers.

Mother:

Diana George Landers

Wife:

Michelle Reyers Landers

grandmother:

Muriel Brown George

References

• Sean Landers Official Website
• Sean Landers The volume presents an overview of Landers' work, including text and cartoon works on paper, paintings, sculptures, videos and audio works from 1992.
  2008