Mernet Larsen: Studio at Frieze Masters 2024
The artist describes her 'intense jealousy' of renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and how she just wants 'to make good old-fashioned paintings of people and things'
The artist describes her 'intense jealousy' of renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and how she just wants 'to make good old-fashioned paintings of people and things'
Since the 1960s, Mernet Larsen has strived to defamiliarize the viewer’s relationship to painted space. What should be flat gains startling spatial dimension; and what one would expect to be close appears far away. Larsen’s ‘people and things’ are familiar, yet they eschew conventional rules of depiction to exist within a parallel, viable pictorialism.
Through close study of 11th-century Chinese painting traditions, 12th-century Japanese narrative emaki, Turkish and Indian miniatures, and the work of Russian Constructivists, Larsen has found compelling alternatives to hegemonized Western linear perspective. Her explorations of compositional space have sometimes taken her work to the point of abstraction.
Larsen’s later career has been marked by the rediscovery of figuration and the potential monumentality of commonplace objects and events, as she encountered it in the work of Nicolas Poussin, Piero della Francesca and, more recently, Paul Cézanne. Insisting on figuration yet defying the idea of a single point of view from which everything falls into place, Larsen’s work unsettles the viewer, often to humorous effect. Multiple points of disappearance and reversed and isometric perspectives offer a composite sense of space and narrative that – in Larsen’s view – is more in accord with contemporary concepts of reality.
About Mernet Larsen
Mernet Larsen (b. 1940, Houghton) lives and works in Tampa. She has exhibited extensively since the late 1970s and has been the subject of over thirty solo exhibitions, including ‘Mernet Larsen: The Ordinary, Reoriented’, Akron Art Museum, 2019, and ‘Getting Measured: Mernet Larsen, 1957-2017’, Tampa Museum of Art, 2017.
Her work is in numerous collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, the X Museum, Beijing, China, among others. Larsen received her BFA from the University of Florida, and her MFA from Indiana University. A solo presentation of her work was recently included in Florida Contemporary 2023-24 at The Baker Museum at Artis—Naples, in Naples, FL. She lives and works between Tampa, Florida and Jackson Heights, New York.
About Studio at Frieze Masters 2024
Expanded in its second year, the Studio section, curated by Sheena Wagstaff, highlights Frieze Masters’ commitment to living practice in dialogue with historical art. By focusing on artists’ place of making, it reflects the idea of the past informing the present moment of creation in an object for the future.
Following its much-lauded debut in 2023, Studio this year features ten solo presentations by Beatrice Caracciolo (Paula Cooper Gallery), Isabella Ducrot (Sadie Coles HQ, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Standard (Oslo)), Nathalie Du Pasquier (Pace Gallery), Shirazeh Houshiary (Lisson Gallery), Kim Yun Shin (Lehmann Maupin), Mernet Larsen (James Cohan), Thaddeus Mosley (Karma), Doris Salcedo (White Cube), Nilima Sheikh (Chemould Prescott Road) and Adriana Varejão (Victoria Miro).
Find Out More
Segments of Mernet Larsen’s interview audio are taken from 'James Cohan Features: Mernet Larsen', courtesy of James Cohan Gallery and Sunset People Productions. Footage courtesy of Christopher Harris
