Ted Mineo
August 12, 2025

Much like his work, artist Ted Mineo’s mixtape ranges from serious to weird, funny to terrifying, funky to sentimental. Mineo’s paintings are painfully realistic depictions of fantastic objects and spaces. His latest work, shown most recently at Harkawik in New York, combines elements of hospital operating theaters, dentists’ chairs, space ship interiors, and optical illusions. These uncanny pictures are painted intuitively without reference to observation—they are about summoning something into existence rather than recording external reality. Flesh nestles up inside metal armatures, shadows misbehave, rigid architectures bend and flex.

Mineo’s work extends beyond painting to drawings, photo collages, and even music. We discuss his love of collaboration and the projects he’s worked on with with the electronic band Matmos, the writer Sheila Heti, and his own experimental band Voider.

Mineo brings his irreverent and irrational logic to everything he does. This conversation gets at the things that make his biomechanical subjects tick.

1. Silence; Charlie Haden with Carla Bley, Don Cherry, Sharon Freeman, Mick Goodrick, Jack Jeffers, Michael Mantler, Paul Motian, Jim Pepper, Dewey Redman; 1983
   
2. The Electrician, The Walker Brothers, 1978
   
3. Shipbuilding, Robert Wyatt, 1999
   
4. Frame By Frame, King Crimson, 1981
   
5. Zero Degree Machine, Horse Lords, 2022
   
6. Super Spirit, George Clinton with Junie Morrison, 1995
   
7. Letter to 0, Voider, 2017
   
8. Ghosts, Japan, 1981
   
9. Changes Reprise, Rafael Toral, 2024
   
10. Spinning Away, Brian Eno & John Cale, 1990
    
11. You've Got a Friend - Live, Donny Hathaway, 1972
    
12. Berceuse, Myriam Gendron feat. Zoh Amba, 2024
    
13. Late Night Shopping, David Sylvian, 2003
    
14. The River, Suzanne Langille & Loren Connors, 1998
    
15. That's Life, James Brown, 1969
    
16. Horizontal Hold, This Heat, 1977
    
17. Shutout, The Walker Brothers, 1978
    
18. (There's) Always Something There to Remind Me, Dionne Warwick, 1967

Ted Mineo (b. 1981, New Orleans, Louisiana) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and featured in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He earned his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from the Yale School of Art. In 2025, he presented new work in Objects, Intuitions, Concepts at Harkawik in Tribeca and created the album cover for Matmos’s Metallic Life Review. Since 2010, Mineo has taught painting, drawing, and design in New York (and sometimes Boston and Philadelphia). He primarily works as a painter and draftsman with occasional forays into photography, digital collage and music.