Mernet Larsen: Gallery Exhibition at 48 Walker St

“Brimming with mordant humor, Mernet Larsen’s unsettling paintings provide a mirror to our anxious times. Through unexpected compositional moves [...] she transforms these prosaic moments into psychological dramas that hint at the dislocations, disruptions, and dread that fill our lives, especially at a time marked by political and cultural upheaval and a deadly pandemic.”¹

 

—Veronica Roberts

"To step into Mernet Larsen’s world is to step off a ledge. A self-avowed enemy of horizons, Larsen revels in disorientation. Toying with perspective and favoring inversion, her paintings reward the embrace of vertigo. Larsen’s organization of space momentarily scrambles the brain, drawing viewers’ attention to their own faculties of perception. Where is up and where is down, what is near and what is far, what am I seeing, and—perhaps most unnervingly—where am I?"²

 

—Susan Thompson

 

 

Mernet Larsen takes compositional cues from art of the past as springboards for figure-paintings that speak to the anxieties of the present. In her work, abstraction is a tool used to access a form of representation unrestricted by the conventions of illusionism and thus more closely aligned with real life. In these efforts, El Lissitzky is an important touchstone: she often riffs off of his compositions as parameters for free-association, slowly building geometric structure into a psychological ordering of space that reveals itself to her as figure.

“I’ve always wanted to deal with the concrete particulars of my real life. I felt this intense sense of jealousy toward Italian Renaissance painters whose paintings monumentalized the concrete world. They stopped time. They got to have color, they got to have volume, they got to have narratives… I wanted to make as much of that feeling as I could while still taking into consideration my sense of reality at this time in history.”

 

—Mernet Larsen