Works 2007-2023

Ted Larsen: Works 2007-2023 is the first monograph for the visual artist, bringing together over fifteen years of creative output. As contributor David Pagel notes, Larsen’s sculptural works are not easily categorized and often “behave like abstract paintings.” Since 2001, Larsen has sought alternative and salvaged materials in his abstract constructions with the “hope of bringing purist shapes and surfaces back down to earth.” This quest takes Larsen to sites like the metal scrapyard, where he mines the raw material for his work by sawing off sections of older-model vehicles. The works’ surfaces, which hold a particular patinated palette, are unmodified; the colors of the metal that skin the objects—the rusty off-white of an old pickup truck or the vibrant yellow of a decommissioned school bus—are exactly as he found them. Calling to mind both architecture and the reductive forms associated with the Minimalists of the 1960s and 1970s, Larsen’s works upend and defy classification by embracing experimentation, the spontaneous gesture, and the hybrid, while undermining the idea of Modernist purity.