When Robert Therrien 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’s practice. Many feature recurring forms in his work, like a keystone with the words “this is her” scrawled beneath it, or a bent cone titled “this is the path.” But one card stands apart: a paragraph of redacted dashes, followed by the words “this is a story.”
For curator Ed Schad, who organized the forthcoming retrospective “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story” opening at the Broad on November 22, the redacted paragraph encapsulates the paradox at the center of Therrien’s 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. “On a very visceral level, these objects register as things that Therrien loved and valued,” Schad explained. “But they do so by recalling one’s own love of objects, one’s own narratives and memories from childhood.”
Therrien 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—or beneath—them, 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’s work since his death and his largest exhibition to date.
“He didn’t title his sculptures or tell people what they meant to him,” said Paul Cherwick, Therrien’s assistant of 17 years and the codirector of his estate. “He wanted people to make their own connections, find their own way in.”
References to memory and personal history, however oblique, distinguished Therrien’s 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. “Childhood, family, play, they’re all there, but never the whole story,” said Dean Anes, Therrien’s former liaison at Gagosian and codirector of his estate. Industrial design, postwar production, and LA’s thriving fabrication scene all fed the artist’s autonomous vision.
Therrien often began his sculptures by making drawings and photographs. Then he experimented with fabrication, calibrating each work to occupy a precise perceptual space. “More than size, it was about relationship,” Schad said, “and locating where the memory lives in relation to the sculpture.” 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.
Robert Therrien, No title (blue switch), 1988.
Photo Joshua White/JWPictures.com/Courtesy Robert Therrien Estate
“In the perfection of their proportions, these sculptures suggest rationality and objectivity, but their narrative associations denote interiority and personal history,” observed Lynn Zelevansky, who curated Therrien’s 2000 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“This is a Story” dramatizes these extremes of scale with sculptures ranging from a five-inch light switch, No title (blue switch), from 1988—the smallest work the Broad has ever shown—to 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’s 10,000-square-foot ground floor by chronology or series, Schad devised an elliptical, recursive layout. “I’m trying to suggest the way Bob worked,” he said, “by drawing out how his sculptures, drawings, and paintings echo each other.” Throughout the show, familiar forms reappear with difference, accruing new resonance with each iteration. For instance, Therrien’s chapel, with its attenuated off-center steeple, repeats in oscillating sizes and materials like bronze, wood, silk screen, and brass.
The 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. “We always say his artworks play well together,” said Anes. “They stand on their own, but put them together, and oh, do they sing.” Moving between two and three dimensions, large and small scale, the curation unfolds like a map of the artist’s imagination and a primer on his idiosyncratic language.
Robert Therrien, No title (bent cone relief), 1983.
Courtesy the Broad Art Foundation
Therrien 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.“It’s easy to confuse something from 1977 with 2017,” Cherwick explained. “His subject matter, his handling of materials and surfaces, stayed pretty consistent over those 40 years.” Though Therrien was a brutal editor—destroying works he was no longer satisfied with and modifying previously exhibited drawings and sculptures—his reiteration of the same shapes wasn’t a matter of refinement. “He wasn’t in pursuit of an ultimate version or establishing a perfect proof,” said Anes. “It was about working all the way through a form.”
Robert Therrien, No title (large telephone cloud), 1998.
Photo Joshua White/JWPictures.com/Courtesy Robert Therrien Estate
One 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. “They 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,” said Cherwick. Like much of Therrien’s work, the beards move through the registers from reverence to wit.
The exhibition also evokes Therrien’s 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), 2008–15, a domestic sequel to Red Room (2000–7), in which objects mass to become architecture—in this case, supersized pots, mixing bowls, cast-iron skillets, and stainless-steel saucepans—within 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.
As visitors move through the exhibition, they’ll encounter the studio’s 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. “It will be like stepping into another world,” added Cherwick. “His world.”
Robert Therrien, No title (room, panic doors), 2013–14.
©Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Though he exhibited widely—at Castelli Gallery and Konrad Fischer, and in the Whitney Biennial and Documenta—Therrien lacks the name recognition of others from his generation. “Under the Table, along with Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room, is the most sought-after and commented upon work in The Broad’s collection,” Schad said. “Nine out of ten visitors will say it’s their favorite, but [they] won’t know who made it.” That anonymity suited the artist, who disliked interviews and cameras and, as Schad put it, “dissolved into his work like most truly great artists.” Yet it makes the survey feel newly urgent in its efforts to connect artwork to maker without diminishing the mystery that animates them both.
For Cherwick and Anes, the exhibition honors Therrien’s singular life and practice, and offers visitors an escape from the current sociopolitical tumult. “Part of the remedy for this moment,” said Anes, “is to step away from the chaos occasionally and be refreshed and inspired by a litany of beautiful things.” 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. “To present slowness instead of speed, care instead of frenzy,” he said, “feels pretty radical.”
“This is the story,” the card read. At the Broad, that story belongs to the viewer, perhaps, just as Therrien would have wanted.
