Mernet Larsen at ADAA: The Art Show

James Cohan is pleased to present new and recent paintings and studies by Mernet Larsen at the 2021 edition of The Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America. The fair is open to the public from November 4-7, with a VIP Preview on November 3. 

For over six decades, Larsen has created narrative paintings depicting hard-edged, enigmatic characters that inhabit an uncanny parallel world filled with tension and wry humor. Drawing from influences that range from the non-objective geometries of Russian Constructivism to Bunraku puppet theater and Indian miniatures, her works take compositional cues from art of the past, as springboards for figure-paintings that speak to the anxieties of the present.

Larsen employs various spatial systems that often contradict. Combining reverse, isometric, and conventional perspectives, she casts everyday scenarios—like passersby on a city street, or the attendants in a municipal courtroom—into a vertigo-inducing version of reality akin to our own. As curator Susan Thompson has written about her work, “to step into Mernet Larsen’s world is to step off a ledge.” 

Preview available works in our Viewing Room here.