Sean Landers
The Rest of Us, 2023
Oil on linen
42 x 36 inches
106.7 x 91.4 cm
Sean Landers (b. 1962, Palmer, MA)
Sean Landers is a painter and multimedia artist living and working in New York. Landers received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1986 and his BFA from Philadelphia College of Art in 1984. He has been creating and exhibiting his highly conceptual body of work since the early 1990s, employing a vast range of media that includes painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and film, among others. Landers’ uses both visual and written language to expose everything from his innermost thoughts to raw truths about the contemporary art-world and the world at large. Landers’ more recent work sees the artist making an innovative return to painting and sculpture, in which his signature use of text and imagined characters act as channels for his commentary on the ever-changing sociopolitical climate and state of humanity. He has exhibited internationally with notable solo shows at Le Consortium, Dijon; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Various Small Fires, Dallas; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; Marianne Boesky Gallery and Petzel Gallery, New York. In 2023 he had two solo exhibitions, one at Petzel Gallery in March and another at Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature à Paris in October. Two forthcoming solo exhibitions include Animal Portraits at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London that will open this June and another at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo opening in 2025.
His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; New York, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Musée Magritte, Belgium; greengrassi, London; Galleri Nils Staerk, Copenhagen; Anton Kern and Petzel Gallery, New York.
Landers’ work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Dallas Art Museum, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fundación/Colección Jumex, Kistefos Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center, among others.
“Anne Sexton wrote ‘there is death in every goodbye.’ I find that true for paintings as well. We painters transfer fractions of our life into our paintings. One day, paintings will be all that remain of us. By painting we are in a sense saying goodbye, but through the existence of the painting we never leave.”
–Sean Landers
Installation view, Sean Landers, North American Mammals, Petzel, 2014
1962 Born in Palmer, MA
1984 Graduates Philadelphia College of Art, Philadelphia, PA
1986 Graduates Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT
1990 Begins showing with Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
1993-1996 Shows extensively in galleries and museums domestically and internationally
1997 Heart, Mind, Body, Soul: American Art in the 1990s, Selections from the Permanent Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
2002 Sean Landers: Psycomatica Tokyo, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2004 Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, curated by Beatrix Ruf (Catalogue)
Installation view, Sean Landers, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2020
2008 Begins showing with Petzel
2010 Sean Landers: 1991–1994, Improbable History, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO (Catalogue)
2011 Around the World Alone, Petzel, New York
2012 Begins showing with Galerie Rodolphe Janssen
2014 North American Mammals, Petzel, New York (Catalogue)
2015 Sean Landers, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (Catalogue)
2019 Sean Landers, Ben Brown, Gallery, Hong Kong
2020 Sean Landers, Le Consortium, Dijon, France
2023 Sean Landers, Adrift, Petzel, New York (Catalogue)
Sean Landers: Animal Kingdom, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France (Catalogue)
2024 Animal Portraits, Timothy Taylor, London
2025 Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo
Installation view, Sean Landers, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2020
Installation view, Sean Landers, Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019-2020
Installation view, Sean Landers, North American Mammals, Petzel, 2014
Installation view, Sean Landers, Around the World Alone, Petzel, New York, 2011
