Sean Landers: Performance Becomes Reality (Pony), 2014, oil on linen, 55 by 72 inches; courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.
The dry title of Sean Landers’s show at Petzel—”North American Mammals”—doesn’t do justice to his latest large-scale, hyperrealistic oil-on-linen paintings. The show includes three interconnected bodies of work, inspired by both Magritte and Moby-Dick. There are nine paintings of books neatly arranged on gray shelves; other canvases show various animals (fawn, hare, black bear, pony) whose skin and/or fur are made up of colorful Scottish tartan designs. Each animal appears in the bookshelf paintings, too, plaid-less, encased in glass globes on one of the shelves. Finally, there are underwater scenes, among which the most eye-popping is a 28-foot-long painting of a whale with tartan hide.