Sean Landers Exhibition

Sean Landers Exhibition

Petzel Gallery

This event has ended.

Petzel Bookstore presents “Curated by…,” a periodic series of installations by gallery artists who love and create books. From November 7 to December 14, Sean Landers will show, in the bookshop, two of his exacting legal pad paintings, a suite of graphite drawings, and a study on paper for the largest work on view. Along with his important publications and their special editions, many of which, like his seminal body of work Art, Life and God (Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2009), and [sic] (Publicsfear Press Ltd., 1993), are incorporated from works on paper themselves. We are thrilled to have Landers inaugurate this series, an artist who fittingly has long used text as a key element of both his process and product.

In 1990, then emerging artist Sean Landers held a solo show titled Art, Life and God at Postmasters Gallery in New York. The exhibition, which laid much of the conceptual foundation for his work to come, was made up, in part, of 159 sheets of yellow notebook paper, individually pinned to the gallery walls. On the pages one would encounter the fictional musings, trials, and desperations of Landers’s character and artist alter-ego, Chris Hamson—whom Artforum described in a review as “artist-as-failure” (1990).

19 years later, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller produced a complete catalogue of these diaries, published alongside a supplemental show with additional works in which Landers reflected on the original 1990’s series.

Then in 2018 at Petzel, Landers further expanded on three decades of this practice, this time with oversized painted reproductions of legal pad text and drawings on canvas. Beginning with a process of near constant writing and doodling, he then selected pages to reproduce in exact detail, but for the first time, in oil paint at incredibly large scale, including highlighter marks, scratched out edits, and all. Yet another, final extraction of the same text stands alone in graphite and ink as smaller drawings.

Landers continually obscures the distinction between himself and the voice in his work, using pseudo-biographical characters to approach deeper issues of identity and philosophy through parody and humor. Working and reworking words and their pairing imagery over and over from legal pad to canvas and back again, Landers deepens our understanding of what these works could mean. As he writes himself in Fresh Eyes, one of the paintings on view, “It’s best when I forget what I’ve written and then I rediscover it years later and see myself with fresh eyes…I’m not as awful as I think I am…This probably won’t age so well though.”

Landers’s Petzel exhibition catalogues, both editions of Art, Life and God, and the second & third printings of [sic] will all be available for sale among others.

Media

• Prints
• Other

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