Joshua Liner Gallery is excited to announce Ted Larsen’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, Future Living In Yesterday's Tomorrow. The Santa Fe, New Mexico based artist combines nontraditional materials with a Post-minimalist aesthetic to create finely crafted geometric sculptures. Future Living In Yesterday's Tomorrow opens April 4, 2019 and will remain on view through May 4, 2019. The artist will attend the opening reception.

In his practice, Larsen exploits a Post-minimalist aesthetic to explore the expressive quality of materials and the interdependency between the natural and industrial. Recalling Minimalism’s modular structures and serialized forms, Larsen’s three-dimensional objects “aim to bring purist shapes and surfaces back down to earth,” by favoring the unpristine. To create his works, the artist overlays a patchwork of weathered steel, salvaged from automotive parts sourced from scrap yards, over wooden substructures. Typically, not much wider than his shoulders, Larsen’s humble constructions carry a strong visual impact even when exhibited on large walls.

Larsen conceived his first reductivist work in 2001. As the artist recounts, “Up to that point, my work had always referenced things outside of myself, relating to the natural world. In a sense it was a form a simulacra. Watching the disastrous events of 9/11 take place on a TV codified something new for me. I no longer wanted to make work which referenced something or was about something other than itself. No more artifice, just purity.” The artist’s pursuit of purity is reflected in his application of pre-painted materials that require no “simulation for effect.”

Future Living In Yesterday's Tomorrow features a variety of geometric compositions. Some works are composed of square, rectangular, or trapezoidal structures, while others feature angular wedges or rounded forms. Rather than planning out his configurations ahead of time, Larsen follows a set of games to derive the arrangement for each work. Adhering to a predetermined set of rules for each strategy, “the work becomes almost self-producing.” As the artist explains, “I often work within a unit system in which I create geometric building blocks, and by ordering them or placing them in different positions relative to one another, they create new patterns beyond the original units.”

Projecting out far enough to cast playful shadows beneath them, Larsen’s three-dimensional objects inhabit the wall, simultaneously behaving like paintings and sculptures. The artist states, “Sculpture holds the possibility of magic; things can appear or disappear depending on where you stand in relation to the work. Painting doesn’t function like this; no matter where you stand, the piece will always look essentially the same. I love the absolute quality of painting and the endless possibilities of seeing sculpture poses. One of the many things my work addresses is where painting ends and where sculpture begins.”

Ted Larsen lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He received a BA from Northern Arizona University in 1986. Larsen's work has been exhibited in museums and over 100 gallery exhibtions in the United States, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico; The Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, Texas; The Spiva Center for the Arts, Joplin, Missouri; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and OK Harris, New York, NY. His work is in countless private collections around the world, including The Rachofsky House, Dallas, TX; Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Rose Collection; Dallas, TX, Fidelity Investments, Miami, Florida; University of Texas, Dallas, TX. He has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Surdna Foundation, as well as residencies with the Edward F. Albee Foundation and Asilah Arts Festival in Morocco, where he was selected as the representative for the United States of America.