Mernet Larsen at Frieze Masters: Studio: Regent's Park, London

"I try to evoke a sense of permanence, solidity, weight – time stopped, ordinary events made unfamiliar. I understand these paintings as statements of recognition, that “reality” must be constructed, invented, not uncovered. I want nonspecific viewpoints, a sense of vertigo.

 

There is a related disorientation in Indian, Persian, medieval, and Japanese painting, and some early modernism. Instead of being a spectator, as in a photograph, you are both inside and outside, ‘wearing’ the situation, I like to think.”

 

- Mernet Larsen

"Michelangelo once said there was a figure embedded in every piece of marble and his job was to chip it out. I felt something similar: that there was a character embedded in my painting and it was up to me to discover what it was.

 

From the mid-80s to 1999, I was working very improvisational, very involved with process and physical surface: scraping, burying, collaging, peeling, adding sheetrock compound to the paint, so the paintings were kind of like old walls.

 

I had no subject matter in mind, but as I worked, subject matter would emerge."

 

- Mernet Larsen