"Spy (after El Lissitzky)" (2020) belongs to an ongoing series in which Mernet Larsen toys with the conventions of figurative painting to depict abstracted heads floating in space. With a goal of accessing a more authentic form of representation than could be possible with illusionism, she often riffs off of abstract forms drawn from art history to construct figures in her compositions. Larsen first began depicting heads while teaching a graduate seminar on theory in the 1980s, as a tool to convey differences between philosophical mindsets, using geometric form and plays on perspective to reveal concretely the worldviews each withheld. Around 25 years later, Larsen revisited the heads series. She describes these works in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist: “it fascinates me that people think of heads differently than they think of other parts of the body. They think of heads as things that have something inside them. How do you depict the way somebody’s thinking about a head, with something inside a head? [...] I thought of the head things more like essays. Compared with the other paintings, which I think of as—novels? They were more like contemplating what a head is, and what a head means.”