Mernet Larsen: Situational Awareness
September 10 – December 18, 2026
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.
