Acclaimed modernist Ted Faiers created thousands of paintings, drawings and woodcuts throughout his artistic career spent in Canada, New York and Memphis. While his estate spans several distinctive periods, harmonious colors and spiritual rhythms pervade his landscapes and still lifes, narrative drawings, minimalist abstractions and sculptural paintings. Faiers’ earliest work from the 1940s are western landscapes reminiscent of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. While enrolled at New York’s Art Students League in the early 1950s he created mainly studio paintings - still lifes, portraits and street scenes - with a limited palate and a modernist technique. Under the influence of lifelong friend, famed painter Will Barnet, and other abstractionists, his work from the mid-1950s combines abstract sensibilities with primitive philosophies and highly defined, flattened forms. Those shapes became very minimal and fluid in the early 1960s and shortly thereafter morphed into stylized figures. With the advent of pop art in the later 1960s, Faiers’ figures became more pictorial and narrative with a cartoonish sensibility. Finally, in the mid-1970s, he constructed eccentric sculptural paintings on intricately constructed substrates with body parts protruding right off the canvas. Faiers’ trove of work is a revelatory journey through 20th-century American modernism.

Born in England in 1908 and raised in Western Canada, Ted Faiers studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts and the Department of Extension, University of Alberta in Canada and at the Art Students League in New York. He taught at Memphis College of Art for 30 years while leading a prolific studio practice. He completed public commissions for Memphis in May and First Tennessee Bank and had a strong exhibition history throughout his life. His work is in the collections of Alberta Art Foundation, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; AT&T Collection, Chicago; Baker Donelson, Memphis; Butler Snow Law Firm, Jackson, MS and Memphis; First Tennessee Bank, Memphis; Hyde Foundation, Memphis; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis; Methodist Hospital, Memphis; nexAir, Memphis; Suntrust Bank, Memphis; Canadian National Railway, Montreal; and Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, among others.