Mernet Larsen

Mernet Larsen, Intersection (after El Lissitzky), acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 46.75" x 63", 2020.

Mernet Larsen (born 1940) is an American artist known for idiosyncratic, disorienting narrative paintings that depict a highly abstracted, parallel world of enigmatic and mundane scenarios. Since 2000, her work has been characterized by flat, origami-like figures composed of plank-like shapes and blocky volumes and non-illusionistic space with a dislocated, aggregated vision freely combining incompatible pictorial systems—reverse, isometric, parallel, and conventional Renaissance perspectives—and various visual distortions. Critics have described her approach as "a heady, unlikely brew" taking compositional cues from wide-ranging sources, including the modernist geometries of Constructivist artists like El Lissitzky, Japanese Bunraku puppet theater and emaki narrative scrolls, early Chinese landscapes, and Indian miniatures and palace paintings. Roberta Smith wrote that Larsen's works "navigate the divide between abstraction and representation with a form of geometric figuration that owes less to Cubo-Futurism than to de Chirico, architectural rendering and early Renaissance painting of the Sienese kind. They relish human connection and odd, stretched out, sometimes contradictory perspectival effects, often perpetuated by radical shifts in scale."

Larsen has exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Museum of Women in the Arts, White Cube (London), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Tampa Museum of Art and Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australia), among other venues. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Walker Art Center, among others. She lives and works in Tampa, Florida and Jackson Heights, New York with her husband, artist Roger Clay Palmer.

Early life and career Larsen was born in 1940 in Houghton, Michigan and spent her youth in Chicago and then Gainesville, Florida. By high school she was interested in contemporary art and painting. She continued with graduate work at Indiana University Bloomington (MFA, 1965), studying with painter James McGarrell.

Mernet Larsen, Escalator, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 44" x 44", 1988. Larsen lived intermittently in Tampa and New York for almost a decade before settling in Tampa in 1981. Described as cool, distanced and highly textured, they were characterized by simple shapes, limited palettes, and an emphasis on the physical surface, which Larsen scraped, buried, collaged, built up and peeled to produce an effect resembling old weathered walls. They depicted a parallel semiotic universe of horizon-less, tilting panoramas and situations frozen in time and populated by characters that married abstract planes of color to well-observed figuration and detail (e.g., The Writer, 2001). In 2005, Larsen exhibited this work at the New York Studio School, a show that New York Observer critic Mario Naves wrote, displayed "a deep-seated originality" in its mix of absurdism, surprising quietude and diverse influences.

The painted scenarios in that show—and a subsequent one at Various Small Fires (2015)—ranged from banal (exercising, domestic life, meetings, café and mall trips) to quixotic (religious happenings, war rooms) to cryptic (a stork hovering over a woman in mall holding a baby aloft in Mall Event, 2010; the vaguely ominous Chainsawer and Bicyclist, 2014). Her exhibition "Situation Rooms" (Cohan, 2018) displayed greater complexity in compositions such as Cabinet Meeting (with Coffee), a disorienting, fish-eye depiction of fantastically small to impossibly large figures in gravity-defy postures that seemed "to dramatize anxiety’s perception-skewing effects" according to The New Yorker. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carnegie Museum of Art, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), Hall Art Foundation, Israel Museum, Ringling Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Rose Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, and X Museum (Beijing). She has lectured frequently on her work throughout Florida and at the Boston School of Fine Arts, New York Studio School, Parsons School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, and other schools and museums.