{"id":280385,"date":"2025-11-24T09:55:22","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T09:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/280385\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T09:55:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T09:55:22","slug":"robert-therriens-world-of-everyday-wonder-emerges-in-la-retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/280385\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Therrien\u2019s World of Everyday Wonder Emerges in LA Retrospective"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen Robert Therrien<\/a> passed away in 2019 at 71, he left behind a series of small note cards, each bearing a labeled line drawing. To those closest to him, they felt like legends that, if decoded, might reveal something of the elusive artist\u2019s practice. Many feature recurring forms in his work, like a keystone with the words \u201cthis is her\u201d scrawled beneath it, or a bent cone titled \u201cthis is the path.\u201d But one card stands apart: a paragraph of redacted dashes, followed by the words \u201cthis is a story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor curator Ed Schad, who organized the forthcoming retrospective \u201cRobert Therrien: This Is a Story\u201d opening at the Broad<\/a> on November 22, the redacted paragraph encapsulates the paradox at the center of Therrien\u2019s practice. He often made sculptures of familiar objects that resist autobiographical readings, deriving their meaning not from what they disclose, but from what they evoke in the viewer. \u201cOn a very visceral level, these objects register as things that Therrien loved and valued,\u201d Schad explained. \u201cBut they do so by recalling one\u2019s own love of objects, one\u2019s own narratives and memories from childhood.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tTherrien is best known for his large-scale sculptures that transform the mundane into the monumental: towering stacks of plates that induce vertigo, split Dutch doors that lead nowhere, and enormous tables that cast viewers back into childhood. Through shifts in scale, dimension, and material, he rendered quotidian objects uncanny. Standing beside\u2014or beneath\u2014them, familiar associations crack open, inviting reflections on how perception reshapes lived experience and memory.The tensions between intimacy and estrangement, between what an object is and what it means, underpin the Broad show, the first major presentation of Therrien\u2019s work since his death and his largest exhibition to date.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe didn\u2019t title his sculptures or tell people what they meant to him,\u201d said Paul Cherwick, Therrien\u2019s assistant of 17 years and the codirector of his estate. \u201cHe wanted people to make their own connections, find their own way in.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tReferences to memory and personal history, however oblique, distinguished Therrien\u2019s work from the Minimalism and Pop art that dominated the cultural discourse in LA, where he lived and worked beginning in 1974. Situated between movements, his practice married formal restraint with emotional weight. \u201cChildhood, family, play, they\u2019re all there, but never the whole story,\u201d said Dean Anes, Therrien\u2019s former liaison at Gagosian and codirector of his estate. Industrial design, postwar production, and LA\u2019s thriving fabrication scene all fed the artist\u2019s autonomous vision.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTherrien often began his sculptures by making drawings and photographs. Then he experimented with fabrication, calibrating each work to occupy a precise perceptual space. \u201cMore than size, it was about relationship,\u201d Schad said, \u201cand locating where the memory lives in relation to the sculpture.\u201d Too small, and the object looked like a toy; too large, it became a spectacle. Each sculpture was scaled up or down from the object it was referencing. Under the Table (1994), the 20-foot-long oak table and six matching chairs, each nearly 10 feet high, is exactly 3.6 times as large as its source material; the work is permanently on view at the Broad. At that scale, a viewer gazing up at the chocolate-brown table becomes, for a moment, a child again, overwhelmed by the wonder, terror, pleasure, and isolation of being surrounded by enormous, alien objects.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRobert Therrien, No title (blue switch), 1988.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Joshua White\/JWPictures.com\/Courtesy Robert Therrien Estate<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn the perfection of their proportions, these sculptures suggest rationality and objectivity, but their narrative associations denote interiority and personal history,\u201d observed Lynn Zelevansky, who curated Therrien\u2019s 2000 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is a Story\u201d dramatizes these extremes of scale with sculptures ranging from a five-inch light switch, No title (blue switch), from 1988\u2014the smallest work the Broad has ever shown\u2014to a 16-foot-tall beard from 1999, No title (large stainless beard), the largest piece ever exhibited by the museum. Rather than organizing the 120 artworks across the museum\u2019s 10,000-square-foot ground floor by chronology or series, Schad devised an elliptical, recursive layout. \u201cI\u2019m trying to suggest the way Bob worked,\u201d he said, \u201cby drawing out how his sculptures, drawings, and paintings echo each other.\u201d Throughout the show, familiar forms reappear with difference, accruing new resonance with each iteration. For instance, Therrien\u2019s chapel, with its attenuated off-center steeple, repeats in oscillating sizes and materials like bronze, wood, silk screen, and brass.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe salon-style hangs reveal how forms transfigure from one object to another: a patinated metal snowman turned sideways becomes a swollen black cloud, whose contours evolve into the wings of a bird in a monochromatic painting, or the folds of a giant wooden bow. \u201cWe always say his artworks play well together,\u201d said Anes. \u201cThey stand on their own, but put them together, and oh, do they sing.\u201d Moving between two and three dimensions, large and small scale, the curation unfolds like a map of the artist\u2019s imagination and a primer on his idiosyncratic language.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRobert Therrien, No title (bent cone relief), 1983.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy the Broad Art Foundation<\/p>\n

\n\tTherrien consistently returned to the same forms throughout his life, lending his oeuvre a sense of suspension. No title (box of six cutout shapes), from 1986, features painted bronze miniatures of six of his core motifs, including an archway, a chapel, a pitcher, a snowman, a coffin, and a keystone.\u201cIt\u2019s easy to confuse something from 1977 with 2017,\u201d Cherwick explained. \u201cHis subject matter, his handling of materials and surfaces, stayed pretty consistent over those 40 years.\u201d Though Therrien was a brutal editor\u2014destroying works he was no longer satisfied with and modifying previously exhibited drawings and sculptures\u2014his reiteration of the same shapes wasn\u2019t a matter of refinement. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t in pursuit of an ultimate version or establishing a perfect proof,\u201d said Anes. \u201cIt was about working all the way through a form.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRobert Therrien, No title (large telephone cloud), 1998.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Joshua White\/JWPictures.com\/Courtesy Robert Therrien Estate<\/p>\n

\n\tOne such form, a beard, figures prominently in the presentation. The idea began with a photograph of Constantin Brancusi, an artist who was hugely influential for Therrien. He set himself the sculptural challenge of recreating the beard in the picture, but as was typical of his process, he promptly abstracted it. In his study of beards throughout history, he gathered over 100 reference images in various forms, including those of other artists, dolls, mannequins, cartoons, and movies. He fabricated beards in wire, hair, plaster, and vacuum-formed plastic. \u201cThey could be seen as a tribute of sorts to builders and construction workers, and at the same time as just being very playful and humorous,\u201d said Cherwick. Like much of Therrien\u2019s work, the beards move through the registers from reverence to wit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition also evokes Therrien\u2019s mind with its recreation of parts of his mythical downtown LA studio, often regarded as an extension of his consciousness. One room will be painted the muddy green of his staging area and lined with the chalkboard rails he used to prop up paintings and drawings. Elsewhere, the museum will reconstruct No title (room pots and pans), 2008\u201315, a domestic sequel to Red Room (2000\u20137), in which objects mass to become architecture\u2014in this case, supersized pots, mixing bowls, cast-iron skillets, and stainless-steel saucepans\u2014within the parameters of a small trash room within his studio. His extensive collection of Gunlocke tables will be used to display smaller objects, such as a plated brass teardrop, No title (teardrop), 2001, or a slick carved plastic witch hat, No title (black witch hat), 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs visitors move through the exhibition, they\u2019ll encounter the studio\u2019s aesthetic sensibility and distinct multiplicity, shifting between workshop, staging area, and gallery. Even in reproduction, the continuity between his working environment and his work promises to be equal parts disorienting and revelatory. \u201cIt will be like stepping into another world,\u201d added Cherwick. \u201cHis world.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"An<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRobert Therrien, No title (room, panic doors), 2013\u201314.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Museum Associates\/Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/p>\n

\n\tThough he exhibited widely\u2014at Castelli Gallery and Konrad Fischer, and in the Whitney Biennial and Documenta\u2014Therrien lacks the name recognition of others from his generation. \u201cUnder the Table, along with Kusama\u2019s Infinity Mirror Room, is the most sought-after and commented upon work in The Broad\u2019s collection,\u201d Schad said. \u201cNine out of ten visitors will say it\u2019s their favorite, but [they] won\u2019t know who made it.\u201d That anonymity suited the artist, who disliked interviews and cameras and, as Schad put it, \u201cdissolved into his work like most truly great artists.\u201d Yet it makes the survey feel newly urgent in its efforts to connect artwork to maker without diminishing the mystery that animates them both.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Cherwick and Anes, the exhibition honors Therrien\u2019s singular life and practice, and offers visitors an escape from the current sociopolitical tumult. \u201cPart of the remedy for this moment,\u201d said Anes, \u201cis to step away from the chaos occasionally and be refreshed and inspired by a litany of beautiful things.\u201d Similarly, Schad frames the show as a counterproposal to the breakneck pace of image production and consumption mediated by generative AI, social media, around-the-clock news, and streaming TV. \u201cTo present slowness instead of speed, care instead of frenzy,\u201d he said, \u201cfeels pretty radical.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is the story,\u201d the card read. At the Broad, that story belongs to the viewer, perhaps, just as Therrien would have wanted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Robert Therrien passed away in 2019 at 71, he left behind a series of small note cards,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,30045,1120,96,114723,114724,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-280385","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-contributor","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-robert-therrien","15":"tag-the-broad","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}