Mernet Larsen has developed a distinctive dialogue with art history drawing from traditional 13th-century narrative Japanese scrolls, the 18th-century Royal paintings of Udaipur, India, and the non-objective paintings of the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky. Larsen harnesses their unlikely geometries to depict our everyday reality, populating her vertiginous and uncanny world with characters that reflect contemporary angst and humor in equal measure. Her works take compositional cues from art of the past as springboards for uniquely spatial figure-paintings that speak to the anxieties of the present. Developed over the last 40 years, Larsen’s independent and meticulous approach to representational painting “reaches toward, not from, life.”