File:Mernet Larsen Explanation 2007.jpg

Painting by Mernet Larsen, Explanation (acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 41" x 52", 2007. Collection of the Rose Art Museum). The image illustrates a mid-career body of work by Mernet Larsen in the 2000s: her paintings poised between abstraction and representation of flat, origami-like figures placed in scenarios that ranged from banal to cryptic. These scenes were characterized by radical shifts in scale, a non-illusionistic, freewheeling spatial sense, and compositions that drew on wide-ranging, multi-cultural sources. Typical scenarios included, as in this painting, faculty and organizational meetings 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. This painting and type of work was publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions, discussed in major art journals and daily press publications, and acquired by museums.

Artist Mernet Larsen. Copyright held by the artist.

Mernet Larsen

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating an mid-career body of work in Mernet Larsen's career from the 2000s, when she produced paintings poised between abstraction and representation that were characterized by flat, origami-like figures composed of plank-like shapes and blocky volumes, radical shifts in scale and a non-illusionistic spatial sense freely combining incompatible pictorial system (reverse, isometric, parallel, and conventional Renaissance perspectives) and various visual distortions. These works took compositional cues and elements from wide-ranging sources, including the modernist geometries of Constructivism, architectural rendering, Sienese early Renaissance painting, Japanese Bunraku puppet theater and emaki narrative scrolls, early Chinese landscapes, and Indian miniatures and palace paintings. Because the article is about an artist and her work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand these later developments and bodies of work, which brought Larsen ongoing recognition through exhibitions and coverage by major critics and publications and museum acquisitions. Larsen's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Mernet Larsen, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.