Sean Landers at Petzel, New York

Situating the artist’s innermost musings alongside his animal subjects, Landers oscillates between humor and vulnerability, revealing the uncomfortable truths which underpin both the act of artmaking and the human condition.

Here Landers fuses longstanding motifs in his work, which originated as discrete series: his depictions of aspen tree carvings, and his North American animal portraits. These modalities have been a cornerstone of Landers’ practice since he was a graduate student in the Yale University MFA program, creating early sculptures of animals which would become his primary subjects, in a studio space which he blanketed with dense, automatic writings across its walls. Landers has since extended these inscriptions, which include confessional content, speculative conjectures, and cheeky refrains, to his aspen tree paintings.

Using the folk tradition of the arborglyph, Landers’ representations of tree carvings serve as both a meditative exercise and a monument to life itself—a record of existence and output. Landers was initially inspired by 19th-century aspen etchings left by Basque shepherds, who lived as nomads across the Western United States. As an antidote to lonely solo travel, the shepherds would etch their names, poetry, drawings, and more into the bark, often using tools like knives, and in some cases, their fingernails.

While aspens only live to be about a century old, in many cases, these carvings have outlived the trees themselves, and remain on fallen, dead trees. Further, the aspens lend an extended metaphor to the interconnectedness of the artist’s practice itself: much like the interwoven root systems of these trees, Landers’ multimedia oeuvre continues to morph and cross-pollinate along conceptual lattices.

When layered alongside his wildlife portraits, his creatures inhabit an existential awareness, gazing back through the viewer with an arresting aura. The eyes of Landers’ animals bear an almost human quality, familiar yet cryptic, staging an engrossing encounter with their quiet effect. In this way, Landers’ personal prose inherits larger contexts of mortality, such as ecological disaster and shifting political realities. His depicted animals are animated alongside bubbles of thought, both playful and foreboding in nature. In this way, Landers conjures reflections on the impermanence of human life and the pieces we leave behind.

at Petzel, New York
until May 23, 2025