Sean Landers

Sean Landers (b. 1962, Palmer, Massachusetts) is a painter and multimedia artist who lives and works in New York City. After pursuing a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art, he received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1986. His practice spans such diverse modes of expression as painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and film, among others. Critically acclaimed for his conceptual approach to painting, he draws alternately from his life experience and canonical references. The artist leverages an arsenal of idiosyncratic characters and wry platitudes that resonate with personal significance. Landers’s diaristic, text-based paintings were instrumental in defining the art landscape of the 1990s, and he has continued to employ text throughout his career, both alone and in darkly poetic conversation with his subjects. 

In recent years, Landers has shifted his practice to sardonic critiques of the ongoing climate crisis. He maroons sailors, clowns, and animals both wild and domesticated in stirring depictions of natural disasters. In the tradition of Winslow Homer and Thomas Cole, these devastating wildfires and tumultuous seas signal the omnipotence of nature and articulate our collective anxieties. Deeply empathetic, Landers’s figuration shines a searing light on his—and exposes our own—struggles to stay abreast of the often absurd reality of everyday life. In 2023, Animal Kingdom, the artist's second major exhibition in France following a 2020 retrospective at the Consortium Museum in Dijon, saw his surreal and stirring animal portraits among natural specimens at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature.