Sean Landers
Sean Landers is an American contemporary artist known for an interdisciplinary practice that spans painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and writing. Emerging in the early 1990s, Landers became associated with a generation of artists who foregrounded autobiography, self-analysis, and the confessional voice as both subject and strategy. His work frequently incorporates handwritten text—ranging from diaristic reflection to philosophical inquiry—alongside recurring characters, animals, and symbolic motifs, creating a body of work that examines identity, ambition, doubt, masculinity, and the role of the artist. Landers’ practice moves fluidly between humor and vulnerability, sincerity and irony, while maintaining a sustained investigation into the construction of the self through language and image. Landers came to prominence in the early 1990s amid the New York art scene, at a moment when artists were increasingly challenging traditional distinctions between sincerity and irony, personal narrative and conceptual rigor. His work was often discussed in relation to a broader turn toward language, self-exposure, and performative identity in post-Conceptual art, as well as alongside peers associated with the so-called “confessional” or diaristic mode.While engaging strategies linked to Conceptualism, Pop, and institutional critique, Landers distinguished himself through a sustained, long-term use of autobiography as material, treating the artist’s inner life as both content and formal structure within painting and sculpture.
Early life and education
Landers was born in Springfield and raised in Palmer, Massachusetts in 1962. He learned to paint from his mother, Diana George Landers, and grandmother, Muriel Brown George, who studied under the American painter Jonas Joseph LaValley.Landers received a BFA in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1984 and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University School of Art in 1986.
Work
Early work (1991–1994)
Landers's formative body of work, produced from 1991-1994, is one that defined the artist, the persona, and the conceptual constructs that he has cultivated and enriched over the course of his career.Beginning in 1990, Landers began to use writing as a visual media and exhibited a body of hand-written work titled Art, Life and God, featuring an alter-ego named Chris Hamson, an amalgam of Landers and his artist friends. Written on yellow legal pads of paper, partly in screenplay format and partly as exemplar writing in which Hamson is the "author/artist", the work gives voice to the inside of the artist's head as it takes the viewer into the world of a young struggling artist in New York City. With each scene Landers weaves a tightly knit world where fact and fiction are blurred, and the intensely personal is obscured by the persona of Chris Hamson. Landers has said, "When I saw the magnetism of the writing, it became the material with which I could work." With its roots planted firmly in the performative, which has remained at the core of his artistic practice ever since, Landers chose to make his life, and the actual act of making the work, the subject of his work. Much of this body of work is compiled in an artist book titled Art, Life and God, published in 2009 by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller.
Landers considers these early writings, and subsequent writings, to be drawings for which the text is the image.
Landers views an entire installation of his work as the greater artwork, composed of individual works that are meant to stand alone but conceived of as part of the whole. This concept adds another layer of meaning to the idea of multi-media. The written drawings were always taped to the exhibition walls and shown with sculptures installed in the center of the room. Made out of wet terracotta clay, with each show, the sculptures progressed from "Hamson's" which were "shamefully" shown and obscured with black trash bags over them to ones made by Landers as "Landers". These wet sculptures needed to be sprayed to be kept alive during the exhibition and at show's end only those that sold would be cast into bronze; a metaphor for art that survives is art that is loved and cared for.
For Landers, video was an integral part of these multi-media installations and provided another performative basis from which to view the show as a whole. He used video to reinforce a fundamental component of the unspoken communication between art and the viewer, and equally, artist and the viewer. Shot in the studio, in which the artist takes a central role, intimate revelations on the part of the artist make the viewer implicit in the action, and a de facto voyeur-accomplice, leading to the viewer's own self-recognition and subsequent evaluation. As Landers said, "The idea was to let viewers into my studio, as an extension of my head, to be with me as I was making stuff. In this process, even dancing with an umbrella became 'making stuff'." The video itself becomes self-referential, and records the time spent making its existence a reality. Landers's videos anticipated reality television, as well as YouTube.
For his 1992 exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Landers exhibited a variety of work shedding Chris Hamson and "unveiling" the artist. Ranging from diaristic calendars, and confessional ranting letters to his student loan officer, to stream-of-consciousness writing on large-scale paper, and cartoons of art-world stereotypes, all of which exposed his inner-most thoughts, it became apparent that the subject matter of Landers's work had shifted to Landers, and he himself became the object of study. By peering into his life, or what he chose to present of it, viewers were once again invited to become a voyeur. As Roberta Smith wrote in her New York Times review of the exhibition, "taken as a whole, the current show creates a feeling of voyeuristic intimacy...his work draws a vivid picture...of both the artworld and the psychic process of art-making itself. While highly specialized, it is also widely accessible, in part because Mr. Landers deals with so many basic human emotions." As Landers said, "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."
First exhibited as artwork in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale in 1993, and then published later that year as a limited edition book by Publicsfear Press, was the culmination of the previous written drawings in their entirety. More autobiographical than ever, and at over 400 pages, it blurred fact and fiction, art and life, and invited comparisons with Samuel Beckett and his novel Molloy. Jeffrey Deitch in his 1996 catalogue essay for the Young Americans: New Art at the Saatchi Collection writes, "The reader becomes drawn into Landers's mind...one has entered into his consciousness and feels as though inside his mind looking out rather than outside his mind looking in." Feeling completely overexposed by his own hand and needing a place to hide, Landers moved to writing on giant pieces of unstretched linen. So large they were impossible to read in a linear fashion, similar to the experience of viewing his earlier large-scale drawings, of which Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, made "reading on foot an essential part of the experience...as one ranges over , reading up and down more often than across, one has the sensation of eavesdropping on Mr Landers's monologue, and this adds a second layer of stream-of-consciousness to the work." These first early paintings, much like the work that preceded them, were performative renderings and records of the exact thoughts the artist had at the point of their creation; an immediate narrative produced in real time. The choice of unstretched linen was a conscious one – their physical form referenced the paper of the drawings that preceding them. The medium of oil on linen immediately gave them a link to traditional art-making practices and it guaranteed the immortality of the words and the artist. "..That's why I stopped writing on paper and started writing on lead primed linen...I wanted it to last. That's behind my impulse to make art. I wanted it to last, to outlast me." During this time Landers experimented with patches of writing on paintings, rather than narrative form stream-of-conscience writing. These patches were designed to actively entertain the viewer in order to prevent them from moving on, and gave them the illusion of piecing together the persona of the artist through his snippets of writings, while denying them the full-picture entirely.
With this early body of work, Landers "foretold the mass-market deaccessioning of private moments, a movement that also includes tweeting, status updates and a lengthening index of user names".
In 1994 Landers moved further into the realm of a more traditional and less overtly conceptual form of picture making by using oblique references to Picabia, an artist who Landers admired for maintaining his creative freedom. Throughout the course of his career, Landers has gone back to Picabia, specifically his spoof of abstraction, the painting "7091", as a touchstone. Rather than copying Picabia's look, Landers quotes him obliquely and uses him as a symbol for his own artistic freedom, which he views as essential for his survival. Landers was now using his writing to create forms – large-scale doodles with different colored text. He also started to insert imagery into his paintings among the writing. Most importantly, this is when the chimp and clown first appear in his artwork. These two characters can be considered as surrogates for the aspects of the artist's personality as they manifest the highs and lows characteristic of his writing; the chimp representing self-aggrandizement and the clown representing self-abasement. During this time Landers started to investigate the use of color while taking a needed break from writing by making colorful stripe paintings which were completely devoid of text.