Ted Larsen

Gallery Affiliations: Conduit Gallery, Robischon Gallery, Schmidt Dean Gallery, McMurtrey Gallery

Region: West

Website: http://www.tedlarsen.com

City / State: Santa Fe, NM

The works I create supply commentary on minimalist belief systems and the ultimate importance of high art practice. An artist’s work usually adheres to the construct of a cohesive direction, with the work illustrating a single theme or underscoring a didactic agenda. But such a logical order has no specific place in my studio practice.

Introducing salvaged materials to my own formally driven abstract sculpture, I hope to bring purist shapes and surfaces back down to earth. I quest for new materials, ‘non-art materials’ to create my work. I am constructing assemblages of detritus in order to re-purpose the materials and re-identify their meanings; to re-contextualize and re-label the idea of readymades. It is my on-going experimentation with contexts, hybrids, and scale.

The works keep possession of pleasing formality and visceral elegance while making fun of modernist purity. This is a tribute to anti-triumphalism, the spontaneous, non-hierarchical, un-monumental, thematic artistic landscape which offers no specific resolution and no isolation of meaning.