A large stack of dishes from the kitchen, a disembodied array of Daffy-like duckbills, an offended storm cloud of previous rotary dial telephones embedded in tangled cords — Robert Therrien’s artwork covers a number of diversified territory.
Whether or not he was making a 3D sculpture to face on the ground, a 2D portray to hold on the wall, or a 3D sculpture connected to a wall like an historical frieze, he managed the identical uncanny outcome — objects the place the purely visible and the totally bodily demand equal time.
On the Broad, “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story” concludes 2025 with one of many 12 months’s greatest museum solo exhibits. A smashing retrospective of a seemingly sui generis artist — Therrien died at 71 in 2019 — he takes a outstanding place amongst quite a few distinctive painters and sculptors for the reason that Sixties and Nineteen Seventies in L.A. that don’t appear to suit comfortably inside bigger classes. Two of them — Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha — have contributed concise reflections on Therrien’s work to the stunning, insightful catalog that accompanies the present.
Nowadays, artwork emphasizing subject material typically shunts type to the facet, as if the visible evaluation that type calls for is irrelevant. With Therrien, it’s important. College students at L.A.’s quite a few celebrated artwork faculties would profit from spending time within the exhibition.
This artwork’s simultaneous enchantment to the attention and the hand, formally lean and visually uncluttered, yields a surprisingly conceptual punch. A way of charismatic presence — the fabric manifestation of an summary thought — is inescapable.
Robert Therrien, “No title (red chapel relief),” 1991, enamel on paper and wooden
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Instances)
Begin with “No title (red chapel relief)” from 1991. The easy contour of a chapel, its steeple barely off-center, stands out from the wall about six inches deep. The simplified form is the type you would possibly see on a Christmas card or a stamp.
A bit over 9 ft excessive, and hung greater than a foot off the ground, the thing suggests architectural scale with out sacrificing a component of intimacy, which invitations a viewer to interact in shut examination. Up shut, the brilliant crimson relief-sculpture is revealed to function hand-brushed purple enamel paint over paper.
Seen most clearly in folds on the corners, the paper is rigorously affixed to the floor of a picket type. Step again, and abruptly the off-centered steeple rising from the boxy type beneath appears to be like acquainted in a really completely different manner: Make a fist, elevate your center finger, and the off-centered contour of your hand repeats the form hanging on the wall.
The church appears to be providing you with the finger again.
The popularity of a sculpture surreptitiously flipping the hen definitely produces a smile. Quickly, although, the wisecrack provides option to extra sober ruminations. Each artist is anticipated to both shake off or renovate conference. Therrien’s generic chapel stands not for any specific denomination or particular non secular creed, however merely for the widespread actuality of established doctrine working all through each day life. That’s what will get the finger.
Therrien isn’t insulting faith. Raised Catholic however long-since lapsed, he as a substitute harnesses an emphatic merger of bodily type and fluid purple colour to conjure an entirely secular imaginative and prescient of the physique and the blood.
Research for Robert Therrien’s sculptures are included within the Broad retrospective.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Instances)
Broad curator Ed Schad notes in his catalog essay that Therrien made 57 completely different chapels over greater than three a long time. He employed a variety of supplies in them — wooden, bronze, metal, aluminum, brass, cardboard, paper, canvas, plastic, vellum, photogravure and wallboard. That’s typical of the curiosity with which he investigated the visible enchantment of artwork’s bodily potential, which he started within the mid-Nineteen Seventies by pouring resin right into a puddle on an asphalt ground, letting it dry, then pulling up the pockmarked pancake and easily pinning it to the wall.
Therrien’s exploratory, inventive bird-flipping isn’t parody, like German artist Anselm Kiefer’s prickly self-portrait images elevating a Hitler salute in entrance of ruined landscapes. It’s extra like Chinese language artist Ai Weiwei’s “Study of Perspective” sequence of images, the place his outstretched hand raises a center finger aimed towards symbolic energy facilities — the White Home, Tiananmen Sq., the Eiffel Tower, the Reichstag, and many others. Notably, nonetheless, Therrien’s digital rumination on the hazards embedded inside unquestioning cultures preceded his fellow artist’s by greater than a decade. The sensuous materials breadth of his work additionally saved redundancy at bay, in contrast to Ai’s in the end repetitive photographic gestures.
The Broad has 18 Therrien works in its assortment, whereas the Museum of Modern Artwork throughout the road has 17. The widespread denominator between them was the early enthusiasm of prolific Italian collectors Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza di Biumo, donors to MOCA and buddies of Edythe and Eli Broad; they had been additionally instrumental in introducing Therrien’s work in Europe. Twenty-five of the exhibition’s greater than 120 works come from the 2 neighboring establishments, whereas the remainder are loans gathered from the artist’s property and museum and personal collections.
Upstairs within the Broad’s everlasting assortment galleries is Therrien’s 1994 “Under the Table,” an Instagram favourite that’s an nearly precise duplicate of his studio’s kitchen desk, surrounded by six sturdy picket chairs. The distinction: All are enlarged in order that the ensemble is almost 10 ft tall and 26 ft lengthy. Downstairs within the exhibition galleries is his associated sculpture of a folding card-table and 4 metallic chairs, rendered in not dissimilar Brobdingnagian proportions. You’re invited to play beneath, such as you’re 6.
Robert Therrien, “No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown),” 2007, blended media
(Joshua White / The Broad)
These tables will not be merely huge. As a substitute, they’re rigorously calibrated to be massive sufficient to permit a viewer to mentally return to childhood, when taking part in underneath a desk the place the grown-ups sat was a standard child factor, with out being so massive as to overwhelm a vaporous reminiscence. Every viewer’s recollection is summoned and given autonomy.
Weirdly — which is to say, in typical Therrien method — the tables and chairs will not be in contrast to these bird-flipping chapels. In each, a universalized norm will get displayed, but it’s concurrently individualized. A chapel and a desk are totally completely different topics, however the precision of the shape propels the content material of every.
That explains his artwork’s titles — or, to be exact, his choice early on to affix every sculpture and portray with the phrases, “No title.” The informal phrase “untitled” was fairly widespread in artwork, but it surely possesses an air of disinterest that appears anathema within the neighborhood of a Therrien. “No title” carries the load of a choice having been made. He doesn’t need to get in your notion’s manner. It’s adopted by parentheses that maintain plain descriptions — purple chapel reduction; oil can; or, folding desk and chairs, darkish brown.
The formal brilliance of Therrien’s artwork is in all places on view. He made beautiful, hand-rubbed picket keystones, every representing the central stone on the summit of an arch. A keystone’s angled downward stress on all sides locks the bigger type in place, paradoxically permitting the arch to stand up.
A few of Therrien’s keystones hold at eye degree on the wall, inviting shut perusal. Others stand upright on the ground, akin to your physique. The sculptures lovingly sanctify a keystone’s rational however enigmatic contradiction of mechanics and performance.
Robert Therrien’s beard sculptures recall the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.
(Joshua White / The Broad)
A virtually eight-foot stack of 26 enlarged white ceramic plates, which derive from dinnerware the artist present in a store, stands as a mind-boggling pillar. Produced from smooth ceramic epoxy over fiberglass, the stacked dishes are piled tilting this fashion and that. Stroll round it, and the shifting, light-reflective and -absorbent white types create an uncanny phantasm of the pillar in jumpy, unstable movement. It’s like stumbling into an previous Max Fleischer cartoon that has come to life.
Maybe the strangest sculptures within the present are a choice of flowing beards, image of maturity and knowledge, which derive from the lengthy, lavish one the nice Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi sported. Born within the nineteenth century, Brancusi made his profession in twentieth century Paris, his work the epitome of Modernist abstraction. Therrien’s beards — usual from artificial hair, plaster, chrome steel or aluminum — hold on wardrobe stands from hooks that may go over the wearer’s ears as a part of a dressing up.
Some beards are large enough for an enormous, befitting Brancusi’s outsize inventive repute. Others are doll-sized, good for a contemporary celeb memento, like Barbie’s Ken. Like historical Egyptian pharaohs who wore false beards to indicate their connection to Osiris, god of the underworld, or criminals wishing to change their look to keep away from the cops, we’re challenged by sculptures representing the ability of artifice.
“What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things,” Brancusi famously stated. So, ever the unconventional thinker, Therrien made actual false beards that embody the essence of that. Kind and content material, the visible and the bodily, create artwork’s spellbinding double helix. Consider these eccentric beards as Therrien’s self-portraits.
“Robert Therrien: This Is a Story”
The place: The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., Los AngelesWhen: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Closed Monday. Via April 5, 2026Price: $19 adults, $12 college students, free for kids; free Thursday evenings 5-8 p.m.Information: (213) 232-6200, www.thebroad.org
