I’m thrilled that a project started more than a year ago has finally come to fruition. Sean Landers: 1990-1995, Improbable History is a comprehensive monograph that includes almost all of Landers’ early oeuvre, from 1990 to 1995. A companion to this 2010 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis exhibition, the book provides the first available overview of Landers’ text and cartoon works on paper, his first paintings and sculptures, and video and audio works chronicling his beginnings. I had the pleasure of getting to know Sean and his family during this project and spent two wondrous trips in New York working with him in his studio, fine-tuning every aspect of this catalog.
A few words about the artist and his work from the promotional material accompanying the book’s release:
Since the early 1990s, Sean Landers’ work has been one of the most fascinating and repeatedly irritating projects in contemporary art. The polar opposites of tormented self-doubt and endless self-aggrandizement run like a thread through the artist’s practice along with a number of masks of failure used by the subject as a strategy to preserve himself from impending loser status. This monograph presents an overview of Landers’ oeuvre including text and cartoon works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and video and audio works from 1992 to the present. With text and video works that appear disguised as conceptual art, he introduces into this genre the taboo of the artist as subject, as well as the artist’s emotions. He has become known as the artist who — with confessional and stream-of-consciousness texts and videos — presents himself as a failure in his art, his life and his relationships.
Sean Landers: 1990-1995, Improbable History is a 10 x 13 inch cloth-bound hardback with a wrap-around dust jacket. At 390 pages and including 400 color images, the book is published by JRP|Ringier and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, with the support of Ringier Collection, Zurich. It is distributed in the U.S. through ARTBOOK|D.A.P. and available for purchase here.
