Mernet Larsen

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Mernet Larsen (born 1940 in Houghton, Michigan) is an artist and Professor Emeritus at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. She is represented by James Cohan Gallery, NY and Various Small Fires, LA. Larsen has been active as an artist since the late 1970s. She is a painter of figurative narratives in highly abstracted style. Larsen lives and works in Jackson Heights, NY and Tampa, FL.

Video Mernet Larsen

Biography

Mernet Larsen received a BFA from the University of Florida in 1962 and an MFA from Indiana University in 1965. She then taught painting and drawing at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL from 1967 to 2003. She has exhibited her work extensively since the late 1970s. In 2012, she was the subject of a solo exhibition, titled "Three Chapters", her first solo exhibition in a commercial New York Gallery, at Vogt Gallery, NY. She has had solo exhibitions at Mindy Solomon Gallery, St. Petersburg, FL (2010), Various Small Fires, LA (2015), and James Cohan Gallery, NY (2016), among others. Larsen's work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Maps Mernet Larsen

Work

Larsen tries to evoke a sense of permanence, solidarity, and weight in her work, creating the essence of stopped time. She creates an artificial world in her paintings, with characters made of geometric solids.

Her 1985-1999 paintings are inspired by Japanese art, with simple and aged-looking shapes. Paintings from 2000 to the present have more modern appearances, featuring futuristic people and land and cityscapes. From 2005 to the present, she has worked on a series of "head" paintings, with geometric face images, made from acrylic on paper.