Since 1990, a ubiquitous pad of yellow legal paper has been the unwitting means through which Landers commenced his artistic career. His constant companion throughout those early days, the yellow pages were the vehicle for his art production—texts scrawled in ballpoint pen documented the details of his life from the banal to the painfully personal. Flash forward 28 years and the yellow legal pad is still close at hand, each page offering a glimpse into Landers’ artistic process. The artist gradually recognized that these works “bear an aesthetic of no aesthetic” and began to use the pages to create his new series of yellow legal pad paintings. These paintings serve to not only illuminate their own existence, but also the existence of a number of paintings in another body of work—the Aspen tree paintings. The attentive reader can literally see the marriage of the writing-side of Landers with his painting-side, by cross-referencing the texts and drawings in the yellow legal pad paintings, with those “carved” into the bark of the Aspen tree paintings.

Publisher: Petzel Gallery, 2018 

Language: English 

Hardcover: 64 pages 

DImensions: 8.5 x 11 inches 

ISBN: 978-0-9988381-3-7

About the artist

Sean Landers (b. 1962, Palmer, MA)

Sean Landers is a painter and multimedia artist living and working in New York. Landers received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1986 and his BFA from Philadelphia College of Art in 1984. From confessions poured out in weblike formations on legal pads to revisions of Hogarth paintings and lonely clowns at sea, Landers’s artworks span an enormous breadth of subjects and touch on existential themes.  Landers has exhibited widely and had solo exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2020); greengrassi, London (2020); Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2019); Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2016); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2015); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, (2010); and the Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2004).

His work has been included in exhibitions at the Musée Magritte, Brussels (2017); ICA, Miami (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2015); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); New Museum, New York (2013); DESTE Foundation, Athens (2013); Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa (2011); Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2011); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2011); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2009); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2009); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2009); White Columns, New York (2008); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2008); 4th Berlin Biennial, Germany (2006); and MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2006).

His works are included in public collections including the Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; and The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Walker Art Center, Minnesota; and The Kistefos Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jefnaker, Norway, among many others.