Sean Landers is an American conceptual artist, best known for using his personal experience as public subject matter and for utilizing diverse styles and media in a performative manner. Through the use of painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, writing, video and audio, regardless of the medium, Landers reveals the process of artistic creation through humor and confession, gravity and pathos. He blurs the lines between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, sincerity and insincerity, while presenting a portrait of the artist’s consciousness. The twin strategies of personal material and formal multiplicity allow him to infiltrate his viewers’ consciousness with raw truths about contemporary society, and the art world in particular. A collateral effect is the viewers’ identification with the artist, which allows for a deeper understanding of their humanity.
Born in 1962 in Palmer, Massachusetts, Sean Landers received his B.F.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1984, and his M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art in 1986. Landers lives and works in New York City, and is represented by Petzel in New York, Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels, Capitain Petzel in Berlin, Timothy Taylor in London, and Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo.
Landers’s work is represented in numerous museum and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Denver Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; Tate Modern, London; Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; and Colección Jumex de Fundación Jumex Arte Conemporáneo, Mexico City.