For Mernet Larsen, Painting Is a Matter of Perspective

When Mernet Larsen was in her 70s, the project she had been working on her entire life met a moment. It was the 2010s, and painters everywhere were grappling with how the digital realm affected what we see. People seeing Larsen’s paintings for the first time often assumed that they were made using a computer, reading her signature blocky figures as robotic or pixelated—something a machine would create. But they are not computational at all. What Larsen has spent 50-odd years exploring is, in fact, much more general: the systems by which we humans have translated 3D spaces onto 2D surfaces across time and cultures. In a world newly dominated by screens, flattening began to exceed painterly problems and pervade everyday life. 

Larsen, now 86, is amused by interpretations of her figures as robots or avatars, describing herself as a “Luddite.” If her paintings, with their flat colors and tessellated shapes, look digital, it’s because the computer is an extension of much earlier attempts to flatten and order the world onto a grid. 

Larsen began probing the logic and limits of perspectival space in the 1960s. It started when she was a college student at the University of Florida (where her father taught electrical engineering), and found herself wanting to make some meaning out of her boring suburban life. She figured she’d start by drawing ordinary things, like some cows in a field. 

Word got out that she was good. Soon, young women in the dorms were asking Larsen to draw them nude, “as gifts for their boyfriends,” Larsen explained when I visited her Tampa studio. She had been drawing models in art class, too, but found that she was simply less interested in drawing the nude female figure—that staple of art school—than were her all-male teachers. In 1964, she was just about ready to give up drawing figures altogether. That decade, all serious art was thought to be abstract anyway. Until one day she took to sketching her dog just for the joy of it and was hooked.

Today, Larsen’s studio is in her home: an old fire station she bought in the ’60s and shares with her artist-husband, Roger Clay Palmer. The squat building is near the University of South Florida, where Larsen taught for more than three decades. In the couple’s verdant, tropical yard, they leave out food for stray cats. Larsen speaks articulately, but with a refreshing lightness; that funny-analytical hybrid is also the essence of her work.

Soon after falling in love with drawing again, she realized that her affinity for representation was, career-wise, poorly timed. In the ’60s, Ad Reinhardt declared that, with his black squares, he was making “the last paintings that can be made,” and plenty of critics agreed that painting had reached its logical conclusion in abstraction. Larsen wondered: Where do I go from here? 

Abstract Expressionism, then de rigueuramong angsty art school students, did not appeal to Larsen. AbEx was all about feelings, and she is a cerebral painter in every way, one who treats compositions like puzzles to be solved. A painting she made of a car, in 1969, is an early example of this kind of thinking. She asked herself how she could depict the car from her perspective—from the inside—but also show it in its entirety. Holding a shiny teapot in her lap, she drew the tiny, distorted reflection, then blew it up onto a five-and-a-half-foot canvas that’s still in her studio. The resulting navy blue blob has a rearview mirror and is surrounded by trees: a scene utterly mundane, yet playfully distended.

Odd views on ordinary things quickly became Larsen’s signature. After college, she argued more consciously with the abstraction dogma, creating compositions that might have passed as nonrepresentational were it not for their titles: Escalator (1988) shows three horizontal lines arranged on a diagonal against a textured backdrop, as if they were people ascending. From early on, her compositions began favoring lines and rectangles and squares. After completing her MFA at Indiana University Bloomington in 1965, she moved to New York City. Short on cash, she entertained herself with people-watching—at the Met, at Union Square Park. This pastime found its way into her work, which increasingly centered on people engaged in everyday activities. 

“EVERYTHING STARTED FOR ME, career-wise,” Larsen remembered, with a formative friendship. She met the artist Samia Halaby in the mid-’70s at a College Art Association Conference in New York. At the time, Larsen lived and worked in a $170-per-month loft a block from Washington Square. Both Halaby and Larsen had gotten their MFAs at Indiana University Bloomington. They each happened to be carrying slides of their work, which are usually shown through a projector; but bumping into each other casually at the CAA Conference, they held them up to the light and squinted. They saw right away, even in miniature, that they shared affinities. Halaby was, like Larsen, exploring compositions dominated by quadrilaterals. She was also one of the first artists to work with computers, and the first woman appointed full-time associate professor at Yale’s art school, where she helped Larsen get an adjunct teaching job.

Larsen didn’t stay long at Yale. Soon enough, she was offered a more stable and better-paid tenure-track position at the University of South Florida. “It was an offer I couldn’t refuse,” she recalled, “even though I didn’t want to go back.” But after a school in Oklahoma told her outright that they’d only hired her to adjunct because they thought Mernet was a man’s name, she came to feel “incredibly lucky to have a job at all.” She was, after all, the first woman art faculty member in the whole state of Florida. 

The move freed her from the rat race of New York’s artistic trends, which hadn’t interested her much anyway. But it also turned her into something of a regional artist. She scarcely showed outside of Florida until a 2004 group show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, D.C., and wouldn’t show in a commercial gallery until 2011, when she was in her 70s. Still in Florida, she did well, showing in numerous exhibitions, including in a traveling “Made in Florida” show, alongside John Chamberlain and Robert Rauschenberg.

As the only woman in her department at the university, “they treated me pretty well,” Larsen recalled, “but they didn’t treat me as an artist.” They regularly tasked her with teaching art history instead of studio courses. She felt she’d been misled, but also that she “wasn’t in a position to complain,” still believing she was “incredibly lucky to have a job at all.” Testing her team, one day she showed up to a faculty meeting with a fake mustache, curious if anyone would notice or say something (they didn’t). Lecture preparations left her with less time for studio work. But her courses also filled her mind with references she would soon synthesize into something all her own. She wouldn’t begin her breakthrough series, though, until around the time of her retirement, in 2003.

A big perk of Larsen’s academic job was the opportunity for travel grants. Soon her work became increasingly influenced by trips to China, India, and Japan, as well as by the Russian Suprematists El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. From each example, she was looking for different ways to work with rectangles—or, more specifically, planes of space. In Asian architectural paintings, she became especially enamored of axonometric projection, also known as parallel perspective. Whereas Western pictorial space favors linear perspective, with lines receding toward a vanishing point on the horizon and coming closer together as they get farther away, Eastern paintings and architectural drawings often feature lines that stay parallel and never meet. Linear perspective emphasizes an individual’s point of view, whereas parallel perspective suggests a comprehensive one. Ever since that early car painting Larsen made in ’69, she had been trying to account for both vantages. 

THROUGHOUT LARSEN’S LIFE, boredom has served as the catalyst for major breakthroughs. She found a Lissitzky painting she saw at MoMA in the ’80s kind of blah, then worried she might not be a “real artist” if she was struggling to “get” someone so important. So she found ways to try to make the work interesting to her, wondering to herself what the compositions would feel like if the quadrilaterals were figures. Teaching art history, she had seen how Renaissance painters often drafted cubic figures to get the linear perspective just right before filling the blocks in with more organic forms. Imagining Lissitsky’s paintings in this vein, something clicked: She ran back to the “seedy hotel” where she was staying and started playing around with Lissitzky’s Proun 12E (1923). This would eventually become Shoppers (1985).

Larsen played with this technique—riffing on other paintings with intriguing senses of space—for over a decade, eventually building up to a decision, in 1999, to “paint old-fashioned narrative paintings with volume and depth,” creating works that “evoke a classical sense of permanence, solidity, in the spirit of 15th-century Italian painting.” The turning point was Getting Measured (1999), which shows one woman measuring another as if for a dress fitting. They both have blocky bodies, with the logic of the composition adhering less to the laws of anatomy and more to the composition it borrows from: an unfinished section of a 12th-century Japanese narrative scroll. 

Pleased with the results, Larsen soon started borrowing compositions from the Suprematists and from the Asian paintings that had so moved her, replicating the structures of various works and filling them in with figurative content as she sketched. A recurring source is a book she bought from a Buddhist monk while visiting Kyoto in 1985: The book reproduces long scrolls featuring architectural drawings that form the basis of Skier (2013)and Conductor (2012), which show a humanoid ski lift and a humanoid streetlight, respectively. Aw (2003) is also based on an architectural drawing, an Indian miniature painting of an urban scene, the Gogunda Festival. Larsen’s version shows not a cityscape but a man and woman leaning forward to admire a baby in a diaper with outstretched arms. 

Larsen refers to the compositions she borrows as “springboards” or “Rorschachs,” having learned of the classic psych test early on from her mother, a progressive school psychologist at a time when few women in the South were able to get PhDs. Larsen found herself turning source compositions sideways or upside down, then free associating to let her subconscious fill in new subject matter. The results might look cartoony, but they are also incredibly complex, form and content co-creating one another.

Refuting the idea that abstraction was painting’s logical conclusion, Larsen used it instead as a springboard to reinvigorate figuration—as her better-known peers, like Elizabeth Murray and Phillip Guston, were doing around the same time. (More frequently, though, her folded, complicated compositions garner comparisons to MC Escher.) As in abstraction, Larsen’s works begin with form, color, and composition; subject matter emerges from these confluences. But interested as she is in the form of it all, she’s eager to short-circuit that dull reaction abstraction too often elicits: “That reminds me of …” 

This means Larsen adds new content to her compositions until they become perfectly balanced. Harmony tends to determine a painting’s narrative: With the basic structure laid out, she often sketches secondary elements on tracing paper, then places them about before committing them in pencil or paint. Regularly, she finds herself looking for ways to put figures near the top as counterweights. For this reason, angels and window washers are recurring motifs. When I visited her studio, she was reworking an older painting of the US Senate chamber, having been drawn initially to its radial seating, at once round and linear. Never quite figuring out the space, she put it away—until the riots of January 6 gave the subject new meaning, and she thought she’d try pulling it back out. 

It’s easy to see Larsen’s thinking and tinkering in the ruler-straight pencil lines visible even in the final compositions: drawings she fills in with flat planes of acrylic paint. Everything builds on the schemes of the structure she begins with, whether axonometric projection or linear perspective or the Suprematists’ intersecting planes of space. Even the human beings are subjected to the tyranny of the grid, becoming blocky figures, out-cubing Cubism. Larsen is drawing what she knows, not what she sees, following a picture’s internal logic so literally that order folds in on itself, becoming absurd. 

LARSEN’S NEXT BIG BREAKTHROUGH came from another boring, unlikely place: a faculty meeting. Plenty of artists spend a lot of time in these meetings, but she realized she had never seen a painting of one. She looked at the scene before her—people around a table—and asked herself, what if I were the vanishing point? She took photographs, then sketched out three colleagues who, in Taking Notes (2004), get smaller as they get closer to the viewer; linear perspective would have it the other way around. Soon, her view widened—and got weirder, too. Attempting to fit a horseshoe-shaped conference table into Explanation and Committee (both 2007) required her to unfold the space: The tiled linoleum extends, in Explanation, to a distant vanishing point, becoming both floor and ceiling. A figure walks across the bottom of the picture, with tiny tiles behind her appearing far away. She seems to walk not on the linoleum floor but on the bottom of the painting’s frame. For Larsen, reverse perspective opened up a whole new way of depicting space: one entirely rational, but far from natural. 

The work from the faculty meeting series took off. In 2005, she had a solo show at the New York Studio School. Upon receiving an invite, the critic Mario Naves was skeptical, to say the least. His first impression, recorded in the New York Observer, was that the Studio School was deigning to show “out-and-out kitsch,” or “retro pastiche” with a “bubblegum palette.” But seeing the show, he found himself “dumbstruck” by the “stern vein of absurdism” and the “moments of surprising quietude,” ultimately describing Larsen as a “find” for her “deep-seated originality.” Others agreed: The dealer Johannes Vogt took note and signed her. By 2016, she was showing with James Cohan Gallery in New York, and in 2019 had an exhibition at the Akron Art Museum. Next fall, she’ll open a solo show at the Arts Club of Chicago. 

When I asked her what it was like to get so much attention late in life, she replied “Fantastic!” and told me with glee that she’d recently bumped into Samia Halaby at the Museum of Modern Art, where Halaby was showing. She got to tell her friend, “Because of you, all the good things that have happened to me happened.” 

Larsen also described the way her generation saw careerism as beneath them. When she was in graduate school, Picasso was still alive, but “everybody hated him at that point,” she remembered, describing him as a “shyster of some kind, selling napkins for a million dollars.” She spoke of how artists today often seem to make work to meet a moment, whereas she saw herself as painting for posterity rather than relevance. Art history had taught her that anything cutting edge wouldn’t take off until later—so when some attention did come, she was grateful and surprised.  

But while she coincidently met a moment, her concerns exceed it. Figures and faces are her canvases’ focal points, but those faces appear cold and inexpressive. She thinks of her subjects as “analogs” or “characters”—ideas of people rather than specific individuals. This coldness perhaps adds to those computational misinterpretations of her work; and indeed, younger painters interested in the digital clearly echo her contributions, Avery Singer especially. Yet to see her work as simply pixelated is to miss all the interesting perspectival tricks she is playing with the picture plane.  

Larsen is, in fact, collaborating not with computers but with the dead, mining an endless trove of art historical references. A whole series is devoted to riffs on El Lissitzky paintings, drawn as she is to the ways his shapes exist on incompatible, intersecting axes. Last year, she opened “Thinking About Cézanne” at James Cohan Gallery, concretizing a lifelong obsession with the artist, writing in the press release that “his work represented a true revolution in what ‘realistic’ painting should be, reflecting seeing as a constructive act,” and describing how his process involved “building an image.” You can see how analytical Larsen is in both her work and her words. For the show, she borrowed Cézanne’s subjects—Madame Cézanne and the painter’s house—breaking slightly from her typical use of flat planes of color to fill in hazy, gradated skies and seas.

Larsen first fell for Cézanne in her early 20s, and returned to his work as a professor, eventually teaching a whole seminar on his paintings. Revisiting the artist, she found his sense of space to be less strange than she had remembered. In her studio, she showed me a book by Erle Loran that diagramed his compositions, laying out how he subtly distorted reality by playing with different perspectival planes—an idea Larsen took to new extremes. 

Not unlike Cézanne, Larsen finds herself interested, too, in the minimal amount of information required to make a scene make sense. “The whole rule for me,” she said, “is that I have to get to a point where I totally believe what’s happening.” This is less about making sparse compositions than exploring the ways our brains fill in gaps: In Bunt (2016), a baseball player holds a bat while a floating white orb passes for either the moon or the ball. But the batter is essentially a cylinder: Two hands grip the bat that runs perpendicular to his body, but there are no arms to be found. I probably wouldn’t have noticed the absent arms, though, if Larsen hadn’t pointed them out.

FOLLOWING THE FACULTY MEETING breakthrough, Larsen revisited earlier compositions in reverse perspective, treating the viewer as the vanishing point and often eliminating the horizon. Where Escalator (1988) showed a series of straight lines, the dizzying 2009 remake with the same titledepicts a top-heavy escalator that appears to extend downward into infinity. 

But by and large, people seated around tables became Larsen’s main motif starting in “Y2K,” as she consistently calls the aughts. It’s a setting where she, like many of us, spends much of her time. Her tables always figure as a flat plane of some kind, seen usually from above, dictating the space. In Cup Tricks (2018), forced perspective makes the plane of a table feel delightfully incongruous with the room it’s in, with pairs of gamers appearing almost like upside-down reflections of their opponents. 

In 2018, Larsen painted an image of an Obama administration cabinet meeting, putting it in reverse perspective by simply flipping a photograph of it upside down, blowing it up, and tracing the table at its center, reorganizing the bodies to fit the new configuration. Though Obama was no longer in office, she chose a picture from his cabinet because “all the others were all men.” Looking at the source image right side up next to the painting, it is difficult to believe she hasn’t distorted it further. But when she turns the photograph over, you realize how accustomed your brain is to seeing things a certain way, and how just one disruption can throw everything off. 

My favorite table scene is from the Lissitzky series. Solar System Explained (After El Lissitzky), 2020, is a round composition borrowed from the titular Suprematist painter that turns his planetary abstraction into a round restaurant booth seen in bird’s-eye view. A bow-tied sommelier holds two wine glasses that are pointed toward his feet, yet appear upright from the viewer’s perspective. The wine is unspilled—comic relief for a complex view.

Increasingly, Larsen has welcomed the occasional organic shape or two to disrupt all the gridded rigidity: a French bulldog in Kindergarten (2019), a spilled cup of coffee in Café (2011). These moments, small in scale, feel utterly chaotic in an otherwise orderly world. The artist Dana Lok described these interruptions to me as the moments Larsen appears to “exhale.” 

Lok, a painter in her 30s who teaches at Columbia University, first encountered Larsen’s work at a crowded opening at James Cohan, and even amid the chaos found herself immediately taken by “the pleasure of getting to witness all Larsen’s problem-solving on the canvas.” Lok told me that Larsen “keeps me excited to paint,” describing her as one of the few contemporary artists she looks to over and over again for inspiration. “Larsen’s work is deeply rigorous, but also playful and wacky”—a sensibility clearly present in Lok’s own candy-colored geometric compositions, too. Amid all her careful planning is something positively carefree. As Larsen put it, “I feel like if I don’t laugh at my paintings at some point, there’s something wrong with the painting.”