Blue Barn

Born February 24, 1964 in South Haven, Michigan

The work Ted Larsen creates supply commentary on Minimalist belief systems and the ultimate importance of High Art practice. 

Since the early 2000’s, Ted Larsen moved from painting landscapes, barns, and houses, in series, to making minimalist sculpture. But, in the transition, he has not abandoned some of the formal concerns he explored on canvas: how color affects the subject, for instance, and how the subject may affect color. 'When I was painting, I might find a place in the landscape, an element that could be primarily described, that sort of transcended the particular and became more universal,' Larsen states. 'The way that I approached the subject matter, serially, I would keep the composition the same, often, but I would change the color. When I painted barns and things like that, I would change the palette of each painting — an all-red painting, an all-yellow painting, an all-blue painting — and the barn would always be the same compositional form on the picture plane. Changing the palette allowed me to look at the relationships between color and form. I wasn’t particularly interested in landscapes or barns or anything like that. I was interested in them being a vehicle to paint on.'

Ted Larsen was educated at Whittier College in California. He later graduated from Northern Arizona University. Larsen was granted the 2009 Edward Albee Foundation Residency Fellowship and received the 2008 Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant Award. Exhibited in over thirty gallery and museum venues across the country, his work is included in the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Krasel Art Center, St. Joseph, Michigan; and in many corporate and private collections including American Honda Motor Co., Inc., Bank One, NBC, Capital One, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Inc., Prudential Securities, Reader's Digest, United Artists, Proctor & Gamble, Forbes, Inc., PepsiCo, University of Miami, JP Morgan Chase, United Airlines, and Dreyfus Funds. Larsen lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.