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.Smith, Roberta. "Mernet Larsen: 'Three Chapters,'" The New York Times, October 4, 2012. Retrieved September 8, 2022.The New Yorker. "Mernet Larsen," May 21, 2018.Steinhauer, Jillian. "3 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now," The New York Times, January 13, 2021. Retrieved September 8, 2022. Since 2000, her work has been characterized by flat, origami-like figures composed of plank-like shapes and blocky volumesAvgikos, Jan. "Mernet Larsen," Artforum, April 2021. Retrieved September 8, 2022.Lehrer-Graiwer, Sarah. "Critics' Picks: Mernet Larsen," Artforum, March 27, 2015. Retrieved September 12, 2022.Berardini, Andrew. "Illusion and Revelation in the Flat Lands: The Paintings of Mernet Larsen," Mousse, Fall 2015. 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.Cohen, David. "Pick of the Week: Mernet Larsen at Regina Rex," Artcritical, March 2011.Ray, Eleanor. "Mernet Larsen: Things People Do," The Brooklyn Rail, March 4, 2016. Retrieved September 12, 2022.Brody, David. "Built Differently: Mernet Larsen’s Strange Constructions," Artcritical, March 11, 2016. Retrieved September 12, 2022. Critics have described her approach as "a heady, unlikely brew"Yau, John. "Mernet Larsen Welcomes You to the Vortex," Hyperallergic, May 6, 2018. Retrieved September 8, 2022. 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.Kreimer, Julian "Mernet Larson," Art in America, April 2016. Retrieved September 12, 2022.Naves, Mario. "Mernet Larsen at James Cohan," The New Criterion, January 7, 2021. 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." Andrew Berardini writes: “With perspective bending in and around itself in Mernet’s paintings, flat space folds the near and far into everything all at once, an immersion where all the vanishing points suddenly appear and aim their infinity like pistols directly back at you.”
Larsen has exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters,Samet, Jennifer. "Beer with a Painter: Mernet Larsen," Hyperallergic, April 3, 2021. Retrieved September 8, 2022. National Museum of Women in the Arts,Schwartz, Joyce Pomeroy. Transitory Patterns: Florida Women Artists, Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2004. Retrieved September 12, 2022. White Cube (London),Ghorashi, Hannah. "James Cohan Gallery Now Represents Mernet Larsen," ARTnews, November 11, 2015. Retrieved September 12, 2022. Israel Museum (Jerusalem),Israel Museum, Jerusalem. "How Long Is Now?" Exhibitions. Retrieved September 15, 2022. Tampa Museum of Art and Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australia), among other venues.Albritton, Caitlin. "Carefully calculated: Mernet Larsen at TMA" Creative Loafing, December 4, 2017. Retrieved September 12, 2022. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum. Mernet Larsen, Artists. Retrieved September 15, 2022. Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Dusk, Mernet Larsen, Collections. Retrieved September 15, 2022. Museum of Fine Arts, BostonMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston. Pause, Mernet Larsen, Objects. Retrieved September 15, 2022. and Walker Art Center, among others.Walker Art Center. Ambush, Mernet Larsen, Collections. Retrieved September 15, 2022. She lives and works in Tampa, Florida and Jackson Heights, New York with her husband, artist Roger Clay Palmer.Moffitt, Evan. "Mernet Larsen: Interview," The White Review, Fall 2018. Retrieved September 12, 2022.
Early life and career Larsen was born in 1940 in Houghton, Michigan and spent her youth in Chicago and then Gainesville, Florida.Ivison, Timothy. "Mernet Larsen," in Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, Barry Schwabsky et al (eds.), London: Phaidon, 2016. Retrieved September 12, 2022. By high school she was interested in contemporary art and painting. She earned a BFA from the University of Florida in 1962, where painter and professor Hiram D. Williams encouraged her to pursue interests in representational work and the essence of objects despite the dominance of abstract expressionism at the time.Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Susan Thompson and Veronica Roberts. Mernet Larsen, Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2021. Retrieved September 12, 2022. She continued with graduate work at Indiana University Bloomington (MFA, 1965), studying with painter James McGarrell. After graduating, Larsen taught studio art and art history at the University of Oklahoma, before moving to Tampa and taking a position at the University of South Florida in 1967; she taught painting and drawing there until retiring, professor emeritus, in 2003.Yau, John. Mernet Larsen, Bologna, Italy: Damiani Editore, 2013. Retrieved September 12, 2022.White, Katie. "These 8 Female Artists Only Saw Their Careers Catch Fire Well Into Their 80s. Here’s How They Finally Got Their Due," Artnet, November 27, 2019. Retrieved September 12, 2022.
Larsen lived intermittently in Tampa and New York for almost a decade before settling in Tampa in 1981. In the 1970s, she painted images of composite, figurative scenes—often observations of city life based on fragments of photographs—that sought to sought to deconstruct traditional realist concepts of homogeneous, unified vision.Nickels, Bradley. "Mernet Larsen: Models of Reality," Mernet Larsen, DeLand Museum of Art, 1992. Her figurative work subsequently shifted in a geometric direction, before entering a period (roughly 1984 to 1999) in which she produced process-oriented, abstract paintings that were influenced by Japanese art, Roland Barthes and structuralism; these paintings revealed the implications and limits of modern formalism by engaging non-formalist literary borrowings, representational plays, and concrete referentiality.Creative Loafing Tampa. "Best Painter: Mernet Larsen," September 25, 2003, Retrieved September 12, 2022.Bennett, Lennie. "All the Corners of Her World: Inside the Singular Mind of Painter Mernet Larsen," St. Petersburg Times, May 2, 2010. 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. She frequently deconstructed modernist abstract and non-western paintings as compositional springboards for the largely abstract works, whose shapes, linear elements and titles (Escalator, 1988; Archer, 1996; Weight Lifter, 1999) alluded to figuration and spatial relationships.
Larsen began exhibiting regularly in the late 1970s and over roughly two decades appeared in solo shows in Florida galleries, various American university venues, and a retrospective at the DeLand Museum of Art (1992), as well as group shows at the Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Tampa Museum of Art, among others.
Later work and reception
In 1999, Larsen adopted an approach that reversed the direction of early modernists by translating abstract paintings into precise, more clearly representational and recognizable—if highly constructed—narrative and figurative works.Naves, Mario. "Mernet Larsen's Tilting Panoramas: Methodical and Inspired Works," The New York Observer, January 31, 2005. The new paintings combined cool, creamy color schemes and a unique method that seamlessly integrated acrylic paint, cut-and-painted tracing paper and manipulated textures.Feaster, Felicia. "Frances Barth + Mernet Larsen," Art Papers, May/ June 2011. They depicted a parallel semiotic universeGriffin, Jonathan. “Mernet Larsen 'Chainsawer, Bicyclist and Reading in Bed,'" ArtReview, May 2015. 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). Reviews would describe the work as surreal, disorienting and metaphorically complex in its juxtapositions of non-sequitur humor and foreboding, upended perception and de-familiarized everyday life.Kinsella, Eileen. "7 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, Mernet Larsen" Artnet, November 30, 2020. Retrieved September 12, 2022. 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.
Following that exhibition and another at Regina Rex in Queens (2011), Larsen gained widespread recognition with her Manhattan gallery debut, "Three Chapters", a three-part show at Johannes Vogt Gallery in 2012.Yau, John. "Prolegomenon to an Artist Who — at Seventy-Two — Is Having Her First Solo Show in a New York Gallery," Hyperallergic, October 14, 2012. Retrieved September 8, 2022. By that time, she had introduced more disruptive compositions that rejected a singular viewpoint and employed reverse perspective—a system common to Roman and Byzantine icon painting and the spatial conundrums of artists Al Held and M. C. Escher, in which elements enlarge (rather than shrink) as they recede from the picture plane. John Yau described these paintings as adhering to a singular logic governed by Larsen's "imaginative synthesis and restating of radically different artists and traditions [that] do not jibe with traditional spatial relationships but fit together like overpasses, cloverleaves, service roads, and on-ramps."Mizota, Sharon. "Mernet Larsen probes perception and experience," Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2015. Retrieved September 12, 2022.
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). Typical were several paintings of faculty and organizational meetings, such as Explanation and Committee (both 2007) or Tanks (2006), with figures depicted in slumped postures and distorted perspectives and scales that seemed to allude to endemic, underlying psychological or social aspects, such as recurrent and petty power struggles, conformity, boredom and absurdity. Reviewers suggested that a key to the work was Larsen's apparent ability to imbue the protagonists and situations with warmth, distilled emotion and specificity—despite the high degree of stylization—through a constellation of selectively attended to, telling details, an eye for the textured surfaces and the effects of light upon them, and the expressive possibilities of spatial arrangement.Goodrich, John. "The Dynamic Distortions of a Formal Painter," Hyperallergic, February 11, 2016. Retrieved September 8, 2022.