Mernet Larsen is an artist and professor emeritus at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. She is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York. Larsen has been active as an artist since the late 1970s, and is a painter of figurative narratives in highly abstracted style. Larsen lives and works in Jackson Heights, New York and Tampa.
Larsen received a B.F.A. from the University of Florida in 1962 and an M.F.A. from Indiana University in 1965. She then taught painting and drawing at the University of South Florida from 1967 to 2003. She has exhibited her work extensively. In 2012, her solo exhibition “Three Chapters,” was her first solo exhibition in a commercial New York Gallery, at Vogt Gallery. She has had solo exhibitions at Mindy Solomon Gallery, St. Petersburg, FL (2010); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2015); and James Cohan Gallery, New York (2016) among others. Larsen's work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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. Her 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.
