Mernet Larsen: Gallery Exhibition at 48 Walker St

1 December 2020 - 23 January 2021

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    For over six decades, Mernet Larsen has created narrative paintings depicting hard-edged, enigmatic characters that inhabit an uncanny parallel world filled with tension and wry humor. Larsen employs various spatial systems that often contradict: combining reverse, isometric, and conventional perspectives, she casts everyday scenarios into a vertigo-inducing version of reality akin to our own.

  • “Brimming with mordant humor, Mernet Larsen’s unsettling paintings provide a mirror to our anxious times. Through unexpected compositional moves [...]...

    “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...

    "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...

    El Lissitzky, Proun 2 (Construction), 1920³

     

     

    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...

    “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

  • Mernet Larsen (b. 1940, Houghton, Michigan) has exhibited extensively since the late 1970s and has been the subject of over thirty solo exhibitions, including Mernet Larsen: The Ordinary, Reoriented, Akron Art Museum, 2019, and Getting Measured: Mernet Larsen, 1957-2017, Tampa Museum of Art, 2017. She has been featured in more than seventy group exhibitions, including presentations at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY and multiple other exhibitions in London and New York. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, among others. Larsen received her BFA from the University of Florida, and her MFA from Indiana University. She lives and works between Tampa, Florida and Jackson Heights, New York.

     

    LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST →

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    ¹Veronica Roberts, "Prescient Paintings" in Mernet Larsen, published by Kerber Verlag, 2021 (forthcoming). 

    ²Susan Thompson, "Mernet Larsen: Inversions," in Mernet Larsen, published by Kerber Verlag, 2021 (forthcoming). 

    ³El Lissitzky, Proun 2 (Construction), 1920, oil, paper, and metal on panel, 23 3/8 x 15 5/8 in (59.5 x 39.8 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art: A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952, 1952-61-72 © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York