Frieze Seoul 2024
Petzel is pleased to present new paintings by Sean Landers and Emily Mae Smith for the 2024 edition of Frieze Seoul. In this dual-booth presentation, Landers and Smith continue to develop motifs central to their respective vocabularies.
Emily Mae Smith
Emily Mae Smith explores plant and fungus forms, longstanding elements across her oeuvre, as allegorical devices within her new paintings. Referencing art historical movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism through her subjects and signs, Smith’s compositions are encoded with rich referents, channeling feminist theory and historiography. Using florae life forms to house the bodies of her subjects, Smith’s compositions embody her signature virtuosic approach, featuring electric colors and smooth gradients.
Sean Landers
Sean Landers debuts new works from his animal portrait series, implementing aspen trees bearing existential inscriptions. Text has appeared in the artist’s paintings since the early 1990s, when the artist composed automatic, stream-of-consciousness writings that illustrated text as image. This confessional use of the written word continues across these works, in which Landers’s commentary is revealed in the form of arborglyphs, carved into aspen trees as his portraits of wildlife sit in the foreground, gazing through the viewer.