SANTA MONICA, CA.- Regen Projects announced representation of Los Angeles-based painter Brandon D. Landers. The artist will present his first solo exhibition with the gallery in January 2027.
Working in the genre of figurative portraiture, Landers centers the quotidian lives of his friends, family, and the broader community, depicting the complexity and depth of lived experience with striking intimacy. Rendering his subjects in sumptuous layers of yellows, browns, blacks, reds, blues, and greens, Landers evokes the richness of Black cultural production through oil paint intuitively applied with a palette knife onto canvases he stretches by hand. The patchwork effect of the thick paint operates in tandem with compositions that merge familiar memory and imagined elements, materializing a universe where everyday reality is infused with possibility. Landers portrays his subjects as smiling or stoic—often as if posed for a photograph—actively engaging viewers with direct, steady gazes. The text in Landers’ paintings is consistently mirrored, underlining the alternative reality of his compositions and making strange the ordinary markers that give shape to our world.
Landers’ paintings received widespread acclaim when presented at both the Hammer Museum and The Huntington in Made in L.A. 2020: a version, organized by Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler, with the Hammer’s Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, assistant curator of performance. Quoted in a profile on Landers for The New York Times, Connie Butler, then the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, recounted the response to Landers and his singular visual language as “strong and immediate.” Fellow Hammer Museum curator Erin Christovale presented a lecture on Landers’ work, stating “I see the collage turned painterly like Romare Bearden. I see raw, energetic groupings like Robert Colescott. I see the privileging of the everyday like Clementine Hunter and I see the toothy grins of an early Kerry James Marshall self-portrait. Landers is an astronaut propelling into the future and what we call our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
On the occasion of the announcement, Shaun Caley Regen stated: “I was thrilled when I first saw Brandon Landers’ paintings in Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum in 2020. Under the shroud of quarantine, the paintings had an authenticity unlike anything I had seen for some time. Celebrating love and community, with intensity and even pain, the paintings commanded attention and left an indelible impression. Brandon’s paintings exist in this world because they need to, and the celebration of his subjects is palpable.”
Brandon D. Landers (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA) received his BA in Studio Art from California State University, Bakersfield. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Landers has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Huntington, San Marino, CA; and Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University, Bakersfield. His paintings are in the collections of The Bunker, Palm Beach, FL; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Prez Art Museum Miami; and The Rubell Family Collection, Miami.
