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 salvage 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 Ready-mades. It is my ongoing 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, nonhierarchical, UN-monumental thematic artistic landscape which offers no specific resolution and no isolation of meaning. – Ted Larsen, 2009
[excerpted from the artist’s website: www.tedlarsen.com]
Larsen’s work has been exhibited widely in museums in the US, including the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe; The Amarillo Museum of Art; The Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Larsen is included in the collections of The New Mexico Museum of Art; The Palm Springs Art Museum; The University of Miami; and The University of Texas, among others.