Sean Landers

Sean Landers (born 1962) is an American contemporary artist known for an interdisciplinary practice that spans painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and writing. Emerging in the early 1990s, Landers became associated with a generation of artists who foregrounded autobiography, self-analysis, and the confessional voice as both subject and strategy. His work frequently incorporates handwritten text—ranging from diaristic reflection to philosophical inquiry—alongside recurring characters, animals, and symbolic motifs, creating a body of work that examines identity, ambition, doubt, masculinity, and the role of the artist. Landers’ practice moves fluidly between humor and vulnerability, sincerity and irony, while maintaining a sustained investigation into the construction of the self through language and image. Landers came to prominence in the early 1990s amid the New York art scene, at a moment when artists were increasingly challenging traditional distinctions between sincerity and irony, personal narrative and conceptual rigor. His work was often discussed in relation to a broader turn toward language, self-exposure, and performative identity in post-Conceptual art, as well as alongside peers associated with the so-called “confessional” or diaristic mode.While engaging strategies linked to Conceptualism, Pop, and institutional critique, Landers distinguished himself through a sustained, long-term use of autobiography as material, treating the artist’s inner life as both content and formal structure within painting and sculpture.