Mernet Larsen

Mernet Larsen (born 1940) is an American artist known for idiosyncratic, disorienting narrative paintings that depict a highly abstracted, parallel world of enigmatic and mundane scenarios.^[1][2][3] Since 2000, her work has been characterized by flat, origami-like figures composed of plank-like shapes and blocky volumes^[4][5][6] and non-illusionistic space with a dislocated, aggregated vision freely combining incompatible pictorial systems—reverse, isometric, parallel, and conventional Renaissance perspectives—and various visual distortions.^[7][8][9] Critics have described her approach as "a heady, unlikely brew"^[10] taking compositional cues from wide-ranging sources, including the modernist geometries of Constructivist artists like El Lissitzky, Japanese Bunraku puppet theater and emaki narrative scrolls, early Chinese landscapes, and Indian miniatures and palace paintings.^[11][12] Roberta Smith wrote that Larsen's works "navigate the divide between abstraction and representation with a form of geometric figuration that owes less to Cubo-Futurism than to de Chirico, architectural rendering and early Renaissance painting of the Sienese kind. They relish human connection and odd, stretched out, sometimes contradictory perspectival effects, often perpetuated by radical shifts in scale."^[1]

Larsen has exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters,^[13] National Museum of Women in the Arts,^[14] White Cube (London),^[15] Israel Museum (Jerusalem),^[16] Tampa Museum of Art and Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australia), among other venues.^[17] Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum,^[18] Los Angeles County Museum of Art,^[19] Museum of Fine Arts, Boston^[20] and Walker Art Center, among others.^[21] She lives and works in Tampa, Florida and Jackson Heights, New York with her husband, artist Roger Clay Palmer.^[4][22]