[1] and the Yale School of Art (2002, MFA in Painting and Printmaking),[2] Saunders lived and worked for about a decade in Berlin, Germany before returning to teach at Harvard University, where he is currently Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities.
[3] Grounded in a practice of painting,[3] Saunders works in a variety of media, most notably large format photographs produced without a camera, as well as complex installations of hand-painted animated videos, which are projected across canvases and other "screens."
"Canvas, oil paint, mylar, and related media — what, in other hands, might be framed and put on a wall — become the ‘negatives’ through which light is passed onto photographic paper," explains Rob Colvin for Hyperallergic.
"Drawing imagery from his own idiosyncratic photo archive of old cinema and television, Saunders breathes new life into them through a process both labored and tender," writes curator Matthew Thompson.
[15] He has mounted numerous solo gallery exhibitions including with the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York (2015), London (2018) and Paris (2011, 2014, 2016); with Blum & Poe in Los Angeles (2011, 2014) and Tokyo (2016); with Harris Lieberman in New York (2006, 2009, 2010, 2013) and also with Niels Borch Jensen (Berlin), Martin Asbaek (Copenhagen), Analix Forever (Geneva), Almine Rech (Paris) and Grimm Rosenfeld/ Andreas Grimm (Munich).