Mernet Larsen: Situational Awareness

Opening September 10, 2026 Mernet Larsen: Situational Awareness 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. The exhibition is curated by Janine Mileaf. Photo: Aw, © Mernet Larsen 2003. Courtesy of the artist and NORR COHAN, New York.