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Sean Landers:Sadness Racket
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Published: March 10 2009

"Plankboy Hurt" (2009) Oil on linen, 182.9 x 213.4cm copy right(c) Sean Landers / Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

“I USED TO BE A CONTENDER. NOW I’M A SURVIVOR.”
-Sean Landers from the painting “Sadness Racket”, 2009

Landers has participated in numerous international solo and group museum and institutional exhibitions including, most recently, the Kunstmuseum Luzern (2008), Swiss Institute, New York (2008), Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2007), Serpentine Gallery, London (2006), ICA Boston (2005) and the Kunsthalle Zurich (2004). In 2010, the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, will present a solo exhibition focusing on the work of Landers from 1990-1993. Sic, Sean’s debut publication was released in 1995 and in 2005, Regency Arts Press published Cartoons, featuring reproductions of a number of the artist’s earlier drawings. The present exhibition consists of six paintings. The works may be divided into two series, each of which addresses the artist’s longstanding concerns; three of the paintings are comprised entirely of painted text and traces of painted text, while the others picture a return of familiar cartoonish characters (a nude-cat-girl, a wounded wooden boy and a patterned male deer). Where our previous exhibition with Landers (2006) was marked by an uncharacteristically slight hint of optimism - the color palette often bright and the text less dense and layered in a number of the exhibited paintings - the present body of work sees a return to the typically self-deprecating humor and self-contradiction which defined the work since Sean’s solo debut in 1990. A reflection of “Sean” circa 2009, an artist in the midst of an (art) world economic crisis, the new paintings delight in the discomfort of a period of decline and transition. * The text was provided by Taka Ishii Gallery.

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