Mernet Larsen Situational Awareness

For more than six decades, Mernet Larsen has been painting. Her representational, yet idiosyncratic, compositions exist largely outside mainstream trends, drawing from 15th-century Italian painting, wide-ranging arts of Asia, media, art theories, and her own memories and photos. Larsen's subjects range from cafes and cafeterias to bedrooms and meeting rooms, and they capture a sense of the mundane as they nod to pictorial antecedents. By merging various perspectival systems, Larsen generates figures that appear as geometric solids in disorienting contexts. The scenes lack horizons and they refuse to center a viewer. As the artist has written, " I want nonspecific viewpoints, a sense of vertigo, so that you are holding each situation in your mind almost as if you are wearing it." As a result, her figures can be disproportionately large or small, flattened, or even upside down, allowing them to exist believably in space. Larsen's personages undertake the activities of life. They have meals, pursue hobbies, gather in malls, homes, or outdoors–but they simultaneously imply a passivity or lack of affect that is unsettling, while still familiar. The bored expressions—or at least poker faces—on many of the figures suggest an underlying critique of society, yet the paintings can also make one laugh out loud. This affect contributes to a stillness that elevates each figural gesture to something more monumental than the mundane activity it represents. Larsen frequently uses abstract images as springboards for her compositions. Treating found motifs as Rorschachs (the famous psychological "inkblot test"), she draws out spatial structures and unconscious attitudes toward subject matter that would not have occurred to her otherwise. The zig- zag angles of the seamstress and client in Getting Measured , 1999, for example, derive from an architectural element in a 13th-century Japanese scroll that she inverted and reimagined. Larsen clarifies that her appropriation of such forms does not pretend to be an interpretation or alliance with the original. Instead, this is a kind of "reverse abstraction" in that Larsen gives recognizable meaning to a detail she has incorporated as pure shape. In more recent works like Cézanne's House , 2023, she does make explicit reference to an earlier artist, but subverts his frameworks at the same time. Such works honor her fascination with Cézanne, for example, but remain deeply original. Across these various strategies, Larsen has invented constructs that reconsider the way daily life is perceived and depicted. Her desire is at once to defamiliarize and honor the ordinary. Larsen has been the subject of more than 30 solo gallery and museum exhibitions. The current focused retrospective highlights many of her greatest works, emphasizing Larsen's subjects from everyday life. It includes about 20 paintings made from 1986 to the present belonging to private and public collections, as well as a number of recent works that have yet to be exhibited.