Over the course of an illustrious career, Landers has made work that meditates on the artist’s existential struggles. He employs a recurring cast of characters that includes a clown, a chimpanzee, and a figure made of wood named Plankboy. Landers obscures the boundary between himself and these alter egos, utilizing humor and parody to lay bare the struggles of artistic endeavors. Throughout, he wields personal experiences as a lens for interpreting universal musings on self-knowledge and self-doubt.
In this body of work painted during the pandemic, Landers expands on this practice through seven portraits of animals. Aphoristic text accompanies most of the portraits, written above each animal as a visual expression of its inner dialogue. He crops in close to each of their faces and emphasizes their quietly expressive nature. Landers’ depictions of a whitetail deer and rooster contain no words, as if the animals have guarded their sensitivities. Viewers can imagine what the creature is thinking or look inward and reflect on their own concerns. They can relate to the animal, and in turn the artist, as they contemplate the anxiety of making, the fear of failure, and the striving for permanence.
He has exhibited widely and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Consortium Museum, Dijon; Kunsthalle Zürich; Petzel, New York; greengrassi, London; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; and Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong. His works are included in public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Denver Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Seattle Art Museum; the Tate Modern, London; Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City; and Sammlung Goetz, Munich, among many others.
[excerpted from the artist’s website: www.seanlanders.net]
