Robert Therrien’s World of Everyday Wonders Debuts in Los Angeles Retrospective

When Robert Therrien died in 2019 at age 71, he left behind a series of small notecards, each with a labeled line drawing. To those closest to him, they are like legends that, if deciphered, might reveal something about this elusive artist’s practice. Many of his works feature recurring forms, such as a keystone with “This is Her” scrawled underneath, or a curved cone with the title “This is the Path.” But one card stood out: an edited dash, followed by “Here’s a story.”

For curator Ed Schad, who has organized the upcoming retrospective “Robert Therrien: It’s a Story,” opening Nov. 22 at the Broad, edited passages encapsulate the paradoxes of Therrien’s practice. He often sculpts familiar objects that resist autobiographical readings, deriving their meaning not from what they reveal but from the meaning they evoke in the viewer. “Deep down, these objects were considered things that Therrien loved and valued,” Schade explains. “But they do it by recalling their own love of objects, their own narratives and their childhood memories.”

Therrien is known for his large-scale sculptures that transform the mundane into the monumental: towering plates dazzle the eye, Dutch-style openings and closing doors that lead to nowhere, huge tables that transport the viewer back to their childhood. Through variations of scale, dimension and material, he makes everyday objects become uncanny. Standing next to or beneath them, familiar associations open up, prompting reflections on how perception reshapes lived experience and memory. The tension between intimacy and alienation, the tension between objects yes and what it is methodlaid the foundation for the Broder exhibition, the first major display of Therrien’s work since his death and his largest exhibition to date.

“He didn’t name his sculptures or tell people what they meant to him,” said Paul Cherwick, Therrien’s assistant of 17 years and a co-director of his estate. “He wanted people to make their own connections and find their own way in.”

References to memory and personal history, however subtle, distinguish Therrien’s work from the Minimalism and Pop Art that dominated cultural discourse in Los Angeles, where he has lived and worked since 1974. Between movements, his practice combines formal restraint with emotional weight. “Childhood, family, play, they’re all there, but they’re never the whole story,” said Dean Anes, Salling’s former liaison at Gagosian and administrator of his estate. Industrial design, postwar production, and Los Angeles’s burgeoning manufacturing scene all fed the artist’s autonomous vision.

Therrien often begins his sculptures with paintings and photographs. He then experimented with production, calibrating each piece to occupy a precise perceptual space. “It’s not just the size, it’s the relationship,” Schad says, “and how memory of positioning relates to the sculpture.” Too small, and the object looks like a toy; too big, and it becomes a spectacle. Each sculpture is scaled up or down depending on the object it references. under the table (1994), a 20-foot-long oak table and six matching chairs, each nearly 10 feet tall, are exactly 3.6 times the size of their original materials; the work is on permanent display at the Broad Museum. At this scale, the viewer gazes upon the chocolate-brown table and for a moment he is a child again, overwhelmed by the wonder, fear, joy and loneliness of being surrounded by giant alien objects.

“The sculptures’ perfect proportions embody reason and objectivity, yet their narrative connections suggest interiority and personal history,” commented Lynn Zelevansky, who curated Therrien’s 2000 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“It’s a Story” dramatizes these extreme scales through sculpture, from a five-inch light switch, Untitled (blue switch)from 1988 (the smallest work ever shown at the Broad) to the 16-foot-tall Beard in 1999, No title (stainless steel beard)It is the largest work ever displayed in the museum. Rather than organizing the 120 artworks on the museum’s 10,000-square-foot ground floor in chronological order or series, Schad devised an elliptical, recursive layout. “I tried to suggest Bob’s way of working by depicting how his sculptures, paintings and drawings echoed each other.” Throughout the exhibition, familiar forms reappear in different ways, with each iteration taking on new resonances. The church at Therrien, for example, with its off-center spire thinned out and varied in size and materials (such as bronze, wood, silk screen and brass).

Salon-style hangings show how shapes transform from one object to another: a rusty metal snowman turns sideways into a swelling black cloud, its silhouette evolving into the wings of a bird in a monochrome painting, or the folds of a massive wooden bow. “We always say his pieces go well together,” Arness said. “They stand on their own, but put them together and oh, they sing.” The curation moves between two and three dimensions, large and small scales, unfolding like a map of the artist’s imagination and a primer on his unique language.

Therian consistently returned to the same form throughout his life, which gave his work a sense of suspension. Untitled (six cut-out boxes)Beginning in 1986, it features painted bronze miniatures of his six core themes, including arches, chapels, jugs, snowmen, coffins and keystones. “It’s easy to confuse something from 1977 with something from 2017,” Cherwick explains. “His themes, his treatment of materials and surfaces, remained fairly consistent over these 40 years.” Although Therrien was a brutal editor—destroying works he was no longer satisfied with and revising previously exhibited paintings and sculptures—his repetition of the same shapes was not a matter of refinement. “He’s not chasing the ultimate version or building a perfect proof,” Arness said. “It’s about working your way through the form.”

One of these forms, the beard, featured prominently in the presentation. The idea started with a photo of Constantin Brancusi, an artist who had a huge influence on Therrien. He set himself the sculptural challenge of recreating the beard in the painting, but as was typical of his process, he quickly abstracted it away. In his research on historical beards, he collected more than 100 reference images in various forms, including images from other artists, dolls, mannequins, cartoons and movies. He creates beards from wire, hair, plaster and vacuum-formed plastic. “They can be seen as a sort of homage to builders and construction workers, but also very interesting and humorous,” Cherwick said. As with much of Therian’s work, the style of the beards shifts from reverent to witty.

The exhibition also evokes Therrien’s mind by recreating a portion of his mysterious studio in downtown Los Angeles, which is often seen as an extension of his consciousness. One of the rooms will be painted the mud green of his staging area and lined with the blackboard railings he used to support paintings and drawings. Elsewhere, museums will be rebuilt Untitled (Room Pots and Pans)2008–15, Domestic sequel red room (2000-7), in which objects come together to form architecture—in this case, oversized pots, mixing bowls, cast-iron skillets, and stainless steel pans—within the parameters of a small trash room within his studio. Gunlocke tables from his extensive collection will be used to display smaller items such as brass-plated teardrops, Untitled (Teardrop)2001, or a sleek sculpted plastic witch hat, Untitled (Black Witch Hat)2018.

As visitors move through the exhibition, they encounter the aesthetic sensibility and unique diversity of the studio, switching between studios, stage areas and galleries. Even in the process of reproduction, the continuity between his working environment and his works is bound to be disorienting and illuminating at the same time. “It’s like stepping into another world,” Cherwick added. “His world.”

Although he exhibited extensively at the Castelli Gallery and the Conrad Fischer Gallery, as well as at the Whitney Biennial and Documenta, Therrien lacked the visibility comparable to those of his generation. “under the table, with Yayoi Kusama Infinity mirror room”, is the most popular and most reviewed work in the Broad collection,” Schad said. “Nine out of 10 visitors will say it’s their favorite, but [they] Don’t know who did it. This anonymity suited the artist, who disliked interviews and cameras that, as Schad put it, “were integrated into his work like most truly great artists.” Yet it gave the investigation a new urgency in an effort to connect the artwork to its creator without diluting the mystery that animates both.

For Cherwick and Arness, the exhibition is a celebration of Serian’s unique life and practice and an opportunity for visitors to escape the current sociopolitical unrest. “One of the remedies for this moment,” says Arness, “is to occasionally step away from the chaos and be refreshed and inspired by a stream of beautiful things.” Likewise, Schade sees the show as a counter-proposal to the breakneck pace of image production and consumption mediated by generative artificial intelligence, social media, 24/7 news, and streaming television. “Showing slowness instead of speed, caring instead of crazy,” he said, “feels pretty radical.”

“This is the story,” the card read. At the Broad, the story perhaps belongs to the audience, just as Therian hoped it would.