He is best known for using his personal experience as public subject matter[1][2] and for utilizing diverse styles and media in a performative manner,[2][3][4] and is especially known for his word art.
[5] His work encompasses many media: painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, writing, video and audio, and he uses humor and confession, gravity and pathos in it,[4][6][7] blurring the lines between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, sincerity and insincerity.
[11] Landers's formative body of work, produced from 1991-1994, is one that defined the artist, the persona, and the conceptual constructs that he has cultivated and enriched over the course of his career.
[12][14][15] With each scene Landers weaves a tightly knit world where fact and fiction are blurred, and the intensely personal is obscured by the persona of Chris Hamson.
Much of this body of work is compiled in an artist book titled Art, Life and God, published in 2009 by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller.
As Roberta Smith wrote in her New York Times review of the exhibition, "taken as a whole, the current show creates a feeling of voyeuristic intimacy...his work draws a vivid picture...of both the artworld and the psychic process of art-making itself.
"[20] As Landers said, "I knew that was why people would endure aching feet to read my art, because while staring into my open soul they were actually evaluating themselves.
"[13][26] First exhibited as artwork in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale in 1993, and then published later that year as a limited edition book by Publicsfear Press, [sic] was the culmination of the previous written drawings in their entirety.
"[29] Feeling completely overexposed by his own hand and needing a place to hide, Landers moved to writing on giant pieces of unstretched linen.
"[20] These first early paintings, much like the work that preceded them, were performative renderings and records of the exact thoughts the artist had at the point of their creation; an immediate narrative produced in real time.
The medium of oil on linen immediately gave them a link to traditional art-making practices and it guaranteed the immortality of the words and the artist.
These patches were designed to actively entertain the viewer in order to prevent them from moving on, and gave them the illusion of piecing together the persona of the artist through his snippets of writings, while denying them the full-picture entirely.
[31] With this early body of work, Landers "foretold the mass-market deaccessioning of private moments, a movement that also includes tweeting, status updates and a lengthening index of user names".
Rather than copying Picabia's look, Landers quotes him obliquely and uses him as a symbol for his own artistic freedom, which he views as essential for his survival.
The painting Alone (1996), depicts a diminutive impasto clown in an insufficient rowboat in a vast seascape, invoking Manet's Rochefort's Escape.
For Landers, the Disney influence was important because it represented the collective unconscious of imagery for people raised in the Baby Boom era and forward.
[45] During this period, Landers went on to continue to pay homage to Duchamp and Picasso as well as other artists with which he shares a personal affinity, Picabia, Magritte, Dalí, De Chirico, Braque, Beckmann, and Ernst by depicting them either as clowns or as ghosts.
Landers's early years, from 1990 to 1995, were the subject of a monograph published by JRP|Ringier in 2011 to accompany his solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Museum St Louis.
[citation needed] Curated by Paul Ha with Laura Fried at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, this exhibition that was on view from January 22 - April 11, 2010 focused on Landers' formative body of work that was produced in the early 1990's that articulates his personal through videos, paintings, and calendar drawings that lends the viewer a glimpse into the artist's consciousness.
A comprehensive monograph was published to accompany this exhibition that includes texts by Michael Bilsborough, Cynthia Daignault, Paul Ha, Matthew Higgs, Dominic Molon, João Ribas, and Andrea K.
[citation needed] Sean Landers' exhibition at Le Consortium - his first in France in over 20 years - offers a retrospective outlook on his pictorial work : about forty paintings created between 1993 and today, mostly from private collections, revisit the various series punctuating his artistic path.
[52] He is married to Michelle Reyes Landers, previously director at Andrea Rosen Gallery and The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.