Ted Larsen: Meaning Comes After

Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the seventh solo of works by Santa Fe-based artist Ted Larsen. Larger in scale and more ambitious than previous sculptures, wall-based constructions deftly balance the formal rigor of High Modernist abstraction with the material language of the everyday.

Built from salvaged and repurposed materials, Larsen’s works transform the remnants of an industrial world into precisely calibrated compositions of color, line, texture, and space.

For Larsen, his studio practice is the open source generation of non-objective sculptures that both respond to the architecture that surround them and allow the viewer to experience and reflect on the emotions they bring to the work.

Notes the artist, “Art comes from a moment in time. So do people. But art doesn’t care about the moment. It is ambivalent at best about us, and makes no accommodation for our attention. We must be the ones to make space for it, to give it time, to slow down and be with it. Art doesn’t move, change, or position itself. It is simply what it is.” Larsen offers the work in this exhibition as a reflection, one that shows itself for what it is, while holding the potential to show viewers who they are.

Ted Larsen (b. 1964, USA) is an internationally exhibiting artist and Pollock-Krasner Foundation recipient with a BA from Northern Arizona University. His work offers commentary on minimalist belief systems and the ultimate importance of High Art practice. Since 2001, Larsen has used alternative and salvage materials in his studio practice.

Larsen’s work has been exhibited widely in museums across the US, including the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, The Albuquerque Museum, The Amarillo Museum of Art, The Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin, Missouri, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as in over eighty gallery exhibitions. He has received grants from the Surdna Foundation and the Pollock Krasner Foundation, along with residencies with the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Asilah Arts Festival in Morocco, where he was selected as the USA representative. He has guest lectured at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts in Greenville, South Carolina, the University of Art and Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, Site Santa Fe, and the Texas Society of Architects in Dallas.

Larsen has been featured in Art in America, ArtNews, SouthWest Art, Mountain Living, Architectural Digest, Sculpture Magazine, and Art Gallery International, with reviews in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Denver Post, and The Dallas Morning News, among others. His work appears in Art On The Edge, Biennial Southwest, The Curtain of Trees, New American Paintings, and Millennium Collection. PBS has produced an interview with Larsen.

Larsen’s work is included in the collections of The New Mexico Museum of Art, The Palm Springs Art Museum, The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Procter & Gamble, The Bolivian Consulate, Reader’s Digest, PepsiCo, The University of Miami, The University of Texas, Krasel Art Center, Dreyfus Funds, JP Morgan Chase, Forbes, and Pioneer Hi-Bred, Inc.