Mernet Larsen

[7][8][9] Critics have described her approach as "a heady, unlikely brew"[10] taking compositional cues from wide-ranging sources, including the modernist geometries of Constructivist artists like El Lissitzky, Japanese Bunraku puppet theater and emaki narrative scrolls, early Chinese landscapes, and Indian miniatures and palace paintings.

[1][34][22] By that time, she had introduced more disruptive compositions that rejected a singular viewpoint and employed reverse perspective—a system common to Roman and Byzantine icon painting and the spatial conundrums of artists Al Held and M. C. Escher, in which elements enlarge (rather than shrink) as they recede from the picture plane.

[9][32][1][8] Typical were several paintings of faculty and organizational meetings, such as Explanation and Committee (both 2007) or Tanks (2006), with figures depicted in slumped postures and distorted perspectives and scales that seemed to allude to endemic, underlying psychological or social aspects, such as recurrent and petty power struggles, conformity, boredom and absurdity.

[34][1][31] Reviewers suggested that a key to the work was Larsen's apparent ability to imbue the protagonists and situations with warmth, distilled emotion and specificity—despite the high degree of stylization—through a constellation of selectively attended to, telling details, an eye for the textured surfaces and the effects of light upon them, and the expressive possibilities of spatial arrangement.

[9][37] Her exhibition "Situation Rooms" (Cohan, 2018) displayed greater complexity in compositions such as Cabinet Meeting (with Coffee), a disorienting, fish-eye depiction of fantastically small to impossibly large figures in gravity-defy postures that seemed "to dramatize anxiety’s perception-skewing effects" according to The New Yorker.

[2] John Yau wrote that Larsen was "simultaneously critical, satirical, and tender" towards these figures that seemed frozen in stiff bodies and isolated, noting an eye for dry, matter-of-fact humor and absurdity that revealed "issues of conformity, hierarchy, and power relationships with straight-faced glee" (e.g., Situation Room (Scissors, Rocks, Paper)).

[38][12] New York Times critic Jillian Steinhauer described the show as one in which "the mundane moment becomes unfamiliar and metaphysical, like a view of reality exploded from within," with angular abstract forms and bisecting planes yielding narrative scenes that were funny (a rooster being handed off to a monk), ominous (a man on a beach with a gun), or cosmic (an astronaut floating in front of a planet).