Mernet Larsen is Professor Emeritus of Painting at the University of South Florida, where she taught for 35 years. She has also taught at Yale among other institutions, been a visiting artist at Rhode Island School of Design, Antioch College and the New York Studio School, among others. She has had over 25 solo exhibitions, including a solo show at the New York Studio School in 2005 and a 25-year retrospective at the Deland (FL) Museum of Art in 1992. She has had over 70 group exhibitions, including in the American Academy of Arts and Letters Annual Purchase Exhibition in NY, "Transitory Patterns" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, "Made in Florida" which traveled internationally. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Ringling Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, FL, and numerous other public and private collections.

Larsen's figurative paintings are complex geometric abstractions in which multi-view perspective and a deliberately awkward relationship between volume and space create a sense of vertigo, causing the viewer to "hold each situation in your mind almost as if you are wearing it." Working in acrylic on canvas with tracing paper collaged onto the surface, the artist notes that the structures within her paintings are often inspired by the paintings of El Lissitsky, Japanese 12th century narrative painting, Chinese landscape painting, and the palace paintings in Udaipur, India. At first glance, the surreal situations and almost cartoonish figurations seem wholly humorous. In time however, a pervasive sense of longing and contemplation arises. Larsen's desire is "to evoke a sense of permanence, solidity, weight; time stopped, essences of ordinary events made tangible."

"Mernet Larsen is a find. ... A stern vein of absurdism runs through the work, as do moments of
surprising quietude... the work is too multifaceted and individual, too damned odd, to merit a convenient peg."
Mario Naves, The New York Observer, 2005.