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Sean Landers

Sean Landers - Artists - Petzel Gallery

Sean Landers was born in 1962 in Palmer, Massachusetts and now lives and works in New York City and Southold, New York. He received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1986 and his BFA from Philadelphia College of Art in 1984. Since the early 1990s, he has been creating a highly conceptual body of work that 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’s more recent work sees the artist making a 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.

In 2023, Landers was the first artist to have a museum-wide exhibition at Paris’s Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature where his paintings and sculpture were interwoven with the institution’s permanent collection of taxidermy animals and artistic representations of wildlife. Additional solo exhibitions have taken place at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Kunsthalle Zürich; Le Consortium, Dijon; and Queens Museum, New York, among others.

Landers has participated in the Venice Biennale (1993) and the Berlin Biennale (2006). His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; Musée Magritte, Brussels; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Museum, New York; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; Serpentine Gallery, London; Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, among others.

His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Kistefos Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jevnaker, Norway; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum, New York, 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

Career Highlights

Sean Landers - Artists - Petzel Gallery

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)

Sean Landers - Artists - Petzel Gallery

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

Historical Exhibitions

Historical Exhibitions Thumbnails
Installation view, Sean Landers, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2020

Installation view, Sean Landers, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2020

Installation view, Sean Landers, Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019-2020

Installation view, Sean Landers, Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019-2020

Installation view, Sean Landers, North American Mammals, Petzel, 2014

Installation view, Sean Landers, North American Mammals, Petzel, 2014

Installation view, Sean Landers, Around the World Alone, Petzel, New York, 2011

Installation view, Sean Landers, Around the World Alone, Petzel, New York, 2011