Mernet Larsen Things People Do

About

The show will be on view from January 22 through February 21, 2016 at the gallery’s Lower East Side location, with an opening reception on Friday, January 22 from 6-8 PM.

Mernet Larsen’s paintings are simultaneously rooted in and distant from reality. Taking inspiration from the geometric abstractions of El Lissitzky and the narrative stylization of twelfth-century Japanese and early Renaissance paintings, Larsen’s vertiginous spaces often rendered in reverse perspective, and hard edged figures offer familiar versions of reality that are analogous and parallel to our own. Developed over the last 40 years, Larsen’s independent and meticulous approach to narrative painting “reaches toward, not from, life.”

In the early 2000s,  Larsen came to a crucial turning point in her work: “I decided that I wanted to paint old-fashioned narrative paintings with volume and depth and the essences of significant actions. I developed a longing for pictures evoking a classical sense of permanence and solidity in the spirit of fifteenth-century Italian painting. But I knew these paintings would be statements of longing, of recognition that essences must be constructed, not uncovered. They would have to be makeshift contraptions, taking into consideration the issues I had been dealing with for the previous 40 years.”

Things People Do presents a selection of new and recent paintings that demonstrate two of Larsens distinct approaches: reverse perspective and what she refers to as “rorschaching.” In Alphie (2015), one in a series of paintings whose subjects are rendered in reverse perspective, the background looms impossibly large while the foreground paradoxically shrinks. In another work, Misstep (2015), Larsen devises an improbable narrative of two figures teetering off the edge of a building. Here, the geometrical characters evolved through this “rorschaching” process of imaginatively constructing figures from the abstract lines of El Lissitzky’s compositions. Larsen uses these two approaches as catalysts to develop highly idiosyncratic and narrative worlds that stretch beyond the seemingly static categories of “figurative” and “abstract.”