FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening reception: Friday, October 10, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel in conjunction with Andrea Rosen Gallery is pleased to announce "Set of Twelve" a video installation by Sean Landers.

The video installation "Set of Twelve" reconfigures a series of videos completed by Landers in 1990. Each video, features Landers in his empty studio, directing a stream of conscious soliloquy straight at the viewer. The art-scenarios run as a portrait of a young artist: from Landers drinking in the studio, painting while watching Bob Ross, viewing the city from his studio rooftop, to being visited by his studio-mate.

Landers' video works have an indebted yet antagonistic relationship to the work of conceptual artists from the 1970s. It is the image of the artist alone in his empty studio that both ties and separates Landers from his conceptual predecessors like Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci. Rather than exploring objective formal boundaries of a metaphysical video space by using one's body (Nauman) or gesture (Acconci); Landers videos are a culmination of spoken word that complete an artist persona that are part autobiography part fiction. Landers spouts an unedited free-flow of ideas with the self-awareness of a conceptual art ideology, effectively trumping an old ideal of discovering objective "truth" with his own subjective "reality". Essentially the work relies on Landers' awareness that the nature of video as medium pertains to entertainment and that through this aspect, his video work from 1990 bridges video art of the 1970's to the youtube video blog of today.

With "Set of Twelve", Landers installs each of the twelve monitors in a ring around the periphery of gallery space. Each video pointed facing one another plays simultaneously. The viewer is caught in the middle of Landers preaching to Landers. Those standing within the installation experience an ultimate symphonic clash of image, sound, words, and background noise. But as the viewer changes their position within the installation one is able to catch certain phrases and clips of each video monologue. This cacophony of decipherable and indecipherable words mirrors Landers' latest series of paintings in which written phrases overlap each other until they no longer read as a narrative but are consumed as an abstraction.
Sean Landers was born in Palmer, Massachusetts, in 1962. He received a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1984 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1986. His recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, China Art Objects, Los Angeles, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo as well as Greengrassi, London. His work is included in numerous museums and public collections including, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, as well as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY. He lives and works in New York City.
A comprehensive catalogue of Landers' work originally published in conjunction with his solo exhibition at Zurich Kunsthalle in 2004 will be republished and available at the gallery.
Sean Landers' [sic],a complete reading of his novel published in 1995 will occur this Spring, presented by White Columns in conjunction with the Art Production Fund.

The exhibition will open on Friday, October 10th, with an opening reception from 6 to 8 pm, and will be on view through November 8th, 2008. Friedrich Petzel East is located at 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.