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The Arts Club of Chicago

Mernet Larsen, Aw, 2003. Collection Tiffany Hott. © All Rights Reserved.

Since 1916, The Arts Club of Chicago in Streeterville has been a preeminent exhibitor of international art, a forum for established and emerging artists, and a celebrated venue for performers from around the world. For over 100 years, The Arts Club has opened its membership to artists and patrons of the arts, and its exhibitions to the public. On view during CXW 2026 is the work of painter Mernet Larsen, showing four decades of her representational yet idiosyncratic compositions, often drawing from 15th-century Italian painting, wide-ranging arts of Asia, media, art theories, and her own memories and photos. Award-winning novelist Lauren Groff has written poetic texts to accompany each work in the exhibition.

About The Arts Club of Chicago
Mernet Larsen, Aw, 2003. Collection Tiffany Hott. © All Rights Reserved.
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.

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