EXHIBITIONS

Sean Landers

Dates: Sep 2 – 30, 2006

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our forthcoming solo exhibition with New York based artist Sean Landers. The exhibition will be our fourth exhibition with the artist whose recent museum exhibitions include the Kunsthalle Zurich,The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington and the MIT Visual Arts Center, Boston. Sean Lander’s Cartoons, was published by Regency Arts Press in 2005.

Throughout a 17-year career as an artist, Sean Landers has created work in a variety of media including sculpture, installation, video, artist book, contribution to popular print media and painting. A post-conceptualist and a major figure in the development of an abject, slacker aesthetic, Landers is recognized as having had and maintaining a significant influence on younger artists of the present generation.

In utilizing the primary media of conceptual art; i.e. language, in a representational manner – the text work always refers back to his own experience as an artist, more generally as a human and most recently as a father – Landers chose failure as a theme. In the grand tradition of artists dealing with failure, Landers found humor as a means for redemption and created a series of diaristic text paintings for which he initially gained renown. In subsequent years the artist has painted his own Picassos, a series of ghost-like portraits of artist idols including Ernst and Magritte as well as cartoon-like portraits of famous comedians and imaginary creatures.

The present exhibition will consist exclusively of text-based paintings. The exhibited paintings represent a return to text, though their content is more abstract than in earlier work. In an attempt to communicate with his family -some of the words found in the new paintings were chosen by his two children – Landers simplified his texts. This simplification creates a sense of interiority and depth as words and phrases appear and recede, fade and overlap in a manner resembling a child-like representation of an entirely egotistical subconscious. Self consciously paintings, the new works’ content is mirrored in their form.