“I’ve always wanted to deal with the concrete particulars of my real life," painter Mernet Larsen has said. "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.”
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. Drawing from influences that range from the non-objective geometries of Russian Constructivism to Bunraku puppet theater and Indian miniatures, her works take compositional cues from art of the past as springboards for uniquely spatial figure-paintings that speak to the anxieties of the present. Developed over the last 40 years, Larsen’s independent and meticulous approach to representational painting “reaches toward, not from, life.”
James Cohan is now presenting a new series of works by Larsen at their Walker St space in NYC. There is also this viewing room.
