21 | Artist profile: Ted Larsen
Solo Exhibition | Ted Larsen from March 8- April 15, 2025 | opening night Saturday March 8, 2025 6-9
Short Stack, 2025
Salvage Steel, Marine-grade Plywood, Silicone
Vulcanized Rubber, Vinyl Spackle, Hardware
5 3/4 x 7 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches
Career Narrative | Ted Larsen
My life has been a kaleidoscope. As a child raised in rural southwestern Michigan on the shores of the Great Lakes, I explored the natural world just outside my back door. I built forts in the sand dunes behind our house, climbed trees and swam in Lake Michigan. My father owned a large commercial orchid greenhouse and I also spent a good bit of time exploring the boiler and mechanical rooms. It was heaven for a curious and adventurous young boy.
The combination of activities formed an enduring interest for me; the natural world offset by the man-made world of machines. By the time I was a teenager my parents had moved us to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There a collision of cultures—Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American—pushed the range of my mind even further. Right before moving my father joined my mother in her field of work: artist. They thought moving to Santa Fe would offer many advantages for their work while also providing a more restful place to raise my sister and me than a bustling urban environment. It proved to be just that. After the initial culture shock, I again found my footing by exploring the natural world in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just outside of Santa Fe, as well as exploring the stunning array of archaeological sites throughout the area.
"Purity comes from distillation. Through a process of removal, things become more clear. What is removed can be as important as what remains." - Ted Larsen, April 2020
Big Town, 2024
Salvage Steel, Marine-grade Plywood, Silicone,
Vulcanized Rubber, Hardware
9 1/2 x 13 1/4 x 2 1/4 inches
The qualities of nature co-existing with human made creations, such as architecture, suspension bridges crossing huge gorges, and the remnants of the Cold War in Los Alamos, again came together in a fascinating way for me. In many ways my early academic career was perfunctory. I read what was proposed, wrote what was required, and worked well enough to be regarded as a better than average student. Along with the rote academic curriculum, I fortunately had teachers who fostered in me a relentless curiosity about the nature of things. Over time these questions formed the basis of how I would approach the world.
By the time I graduated from university it was abundantly clear that my passion was in creative endeavors. I graduated from Northern Arizona University with honors, having majored in Geology and Art. I was given an exhibition of my college-level art at the university art museum in 1986, and quickly made advances in the work which resulted in my first real exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1987 at age 22. The basis of my studio work was a painted exploration of the natural world. As had been the case throughout my childhood, I was drawn to places of beauty, but mostly places where the beauty of the natural world existed alongside the alterations of man. Over the next 15 years this was my path and I tirelessly honed my practice with a reductive eye, allowing just the most important aspects of these places into the composition. The work became reductive and spare, which allowed for greater interpretation. I exhibited this work quite successfully and to critical acclaim during this 15 years.
Boxed Out, 2024
Salvage Steel, Silicone, Rivets
12 x 10 x 8 inches
Toward my mid- thirties, without a full understanding of why, I felt restless and was not satisfied with my work. In the late 1990’s I began experimenting with new and different materials, than an event of monumental impact occurred. Watching the Twin Towers collapse on television, over and over, I abandoned painting entirely as I had known it. Up to that point, my work had always referenced things outside of myself, relating to the natural world. In a sense it was a form a simulacra. Watching the disastrous events of 9/11 take place on a TV codified something new for me. I no longer wanted to make work which referenced something or was about something other than itself. No more artifice, just purity. It wasn’t seeing the events happening that shaped this new idea, it was rather in how I saw them—on a TV.
I continued these new explorations with increasing reductive inclinations, and slowly developed a new pathway. There were many epistemological and aesthetic considerations which have informed me along the way. With a Post-minimalist interest in the expressive qualities of materials, an abiding love of natural materials, how they might encounter industrial materials, and the interdependency between them, I made my first truly reductive work within a year of 9/11. I called them objects as they felt like hybrids between painting and sculpture, but were neither. This is still the basis of my current work. As successful and rewarding as my previous work had been, this new work would take me on a journey I could not have anticipated or loved more.
Rubber Bumper, 2024
Salvage Steel, Marine-grade Plywood, Silicone,
Vulcanized Rubber, Hardware, Rubber Bumper
5 1/4 x 3 1/2 x 2 1/4 inches
Since 2001 I have had over150 exhibitions of the new work with extraordinary critical success. One of the issues I had faced as a painter was making surfaces and qualities in the painting which felt like landscape. Unburdened by representation, I now wrestled with how to make things which were real to themselves. My first discovery was using pre-painted materials. They we real to themselves. They needed no simulation for effect. The pre-painted surface also allowed me a way to appropriate paint conceptually as my “own paint.” I reject the brush, but not painting itself. Metaphorically these pre-painted surfaces also allow me to reference art history, one of my abiding loves. Of the many things which High Minimalism taught me, its use of serialized repetitious form and modular structures which imply infinite reiteration have proven quite important to my work.
I often work within a unit system in which I create geometric building blocks, and by ordering them or placing them in different positions relative to one another, they create new patterns beyond the original units. By covering them with the pre-painted material they become shaped “paintings.” Because these objects inhabit the wall, a place traditionally occupied by painting, they reference painting, and yet function beyond that. Sculpture holds the possibility of magic; things can appear or disappear depending on where you stand in relation to the work.
Brief Survey, 2024
Salvage Steel, Marine-grade Plywood, Silicone,
Vulcanized Rubber, Hardware
10 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 2 1/4 inches
Painting doesn’t function like this; no matter where you stand, the piece will always look essentially the same. I love the absolute quality of painting and the endless possibilities of seeing sculpture poses. One of the many things my work addresses is where painting ends and where sculpture begins. I am involved with hybridizing them to see what possibilities can emerge. The works I create are intended to supply commentary on minimalist belief systems and the ultimate importance of High Art practice. It is my aim to bring purist shapes and surfaces back down to earth. Another important aspect of my ongoing experimentation with my hybrids deals with context and scale. It is my perception that context and content are always in conversation. It is not possible to isolate one from the other without changing the meaning of the work. Therefore, placement of the work is critical to seeing and understanding the work. Scale is another critical aspect in determining meaning.
My work is generally small, typically not much wider than my shoulders and often considerably smaller. Standing in the great history of makers of pure abstraction, I hope to be humble in the advocation of my work and honor those who have traveled this path before me. By making work which is small in scale but grand in conceptual stature, I hope to honor my aesthetic heroes and challenge the notion of small work’s visual impact in context: small work on a large wall—made to hold the wall because of the strength of its presence. All of these ingredients come together in the work to create a pleasing formality and visual elegance while challenging modernist purity.
Carrot Top, 2024
Salvage Steel, Marine-grade Plywood, Silicone,
Vulcanized Rubber, Hardware
7 1/2 x 6 1/4 x 2 1/4 inches
Find Ted on instagram