Robert Therrien’s Ordinary Uncanny at the Broad in L.A.

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1604334" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/Photo-Joshua_White-jwpictures.com-4Q6A3310.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A gallery view shows several framed abstract drawings on a wall behind an arrangement of oversized brown folding chairs and tables, illustrating Robert Therrien’s use of everyday domestic forms at exaggerated scale.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’The exhibition traces Therrien’s evolution from small drawings to large-scale sculptural environments that redefine spatial experience. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photo: Joshua White</span>’>

Sometimes asthma is a good thing. If artist Robert Therrien didn’t suffer from it as a child, he might not have spent most of his time indoors, drawing and absorbing comic book images, and he might not have spent as much time surrounded by the shapes and objects we normally associate with domesticity, such as skillets, stacked dishes, a dining room table and chairs. These items make up just some of the artworks in the retrospective, “Robert Therrien: This Is A Story” at L.A.’s the Broad through April 5.

“He was inside more and kind of a sickly kid,” Dean Anes, co-director of the artist’s estate and former Therrien liaison at Gagosian Beverly Hills, tells Observer. “Back then, in the comic books, there would be ‘Draw Tippy,’ a parrot with a hat, and he would draw those. This gameplay of drawing was also something he did as a child and continued into his work.”

Gathered here are some 120 artworks from the L.A.-based sculptor who passed in 2019. Included are artworks ranging from simple drawings, like those mentioned above, to Under the Table (1994), a 3.6-scale iteration of the artist’s dining room table and chairs that has long occupied a gallery on the museum’s third floor.

“There’s a great desire to see artists as illustrating their memories. Robert Therrien, for me, did not do that,” says Broad curator Ed Schad. “He took generative moments inside his own biography and used that as an opportunity to go and meet a visitor on terrain that is shared. So, even though the table held specific memories for him, that’s far, far less important than creating an object that held memories for you.”

One item that holds memories for this viewer is the logo of Underwood deviled ham, a red devil silhouette brandishing a pitchfork. It is a recurring motif in the show, found in the silkscreen, ink, bleach and graphite on paper, No title (devil thinking about three feet) from 1993, as well as No title (waving devil) from 1991, also on paper. While the latter is in black, the former is in red, and both are cousins of Therrien’s 1993 No title (devil wall), a silkscreen with an off-white background and five randomly spaced tiny devils. All bear some relationship to his No title (red dots panel), inspired by the dots he saw as a child after using his asthma inhaler.

Motifs are common in Therrien’s work, shapes that rhyme, like an oilcan and a chapel, both of which feature a large base with a long thin feeder or steeple. No title (blue chapel relief) from 1982 changed color a year later and became No title (bent cone relief), and later became No title (red chapel relief) in 1991, and No title (black witch hat) in 2018. Similarly, the snowman shape he created in the late 1970s, a stand-in for the human form, when turned on its side became a cloud in 1981 and, later, smoke signals.

“He spoke about the subjects as the more ties and strings of meaning for him, the more interesting they were for him,” says Paul Cherwick, co-director of the Robert Therrien Estate and the artist’s assistant of 17 years. “He didn’t read them one way or another. He saw them in multitudes.”

It’s one of the reasons he left most of his works untitled. “He was very cloaked about the true meaning behind those things,” says Anes, noting a connection to Marcel Duchamp, who likewise found inspiration in quotidian items. “He never divulged that as part of what you were supposed to understand or take away. You were supposed to figure that out for yourself. He could have been making statements with it, but he preferred to have people come and realize what they’re thinking about it as opposed to his take on it.”

At the age of 21, Therrien attended California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and opened a studio in Berkeley. He later studied printmaking at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and painting at the Santa Barbara Art Institute. In 1971, he moved to L.A. and pursued a master’s at USC. A year later, he moved into his studio at 5084 West Pico, a storefront with a living space upstairs.

A landmark year came in 1985 when he participated in the Whitney Biennial with No title (iron snowman) and No title (bent cone). That same year, he showed at Gagosian in L.A. and began his relationship with Leo Castelli in New York City.

Five years later, Therrien moved into a custom-built studio near USC on West 37th Place, which he modeled after his former studio. The larger space had a direct impact on his work. Mainly, things got bigger. Within five years, he made Under the Table, which was exhibited at Carnegie International but was preemptively purchased by the Broad Art Foundation.

In 1998, he made No title (black beds), two plastic and enamel beds placed end to end, curling upward in an arch, which appeared in the artist’s 2000 LACMA show highlighting the change in his work since the 1990 move. Its cousin, No title (large telephone cloud), a steel and enamel snarl of telephone and cords, was made the same year. Both inspired No title (large metal squiggle), a steel sculpture of looped wire from 2017.

“It really did open up the scale when he went to 7,000 square feet,” says Anes about the new studio. “We’re talking about the time when the galleries were really sizing up their works. I know there was a push to create larger things for the greater art world and institutions. His answer was to go supersize and create an environment.”

Oversized pieces in the show include No title (stacked plates), a classic from 1992, as well as No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown) and No title (disc cart III, grotty), which resembles a drying rack for oversized plates.

“Most of the sculptural tradition is about monuments, putting a person on horseback, up on a pedestal to loom over you from a powerful position,” observes Schad. “It’s profound to think that something of size can be about individual human responses to sizes. That it’s not about the powerful figures, it’s not about history, it’s not about religion, it’s about you inhabiting your life, your body, your memories.”

Among the largest works in the show is an oversized beard made of stainless steel. It sits in a gallery with smaller beards made of synthetic hair or plastic, a motif that emerged around 1999. Inspired by Constantin Brancusi, it’s not the only piece he made that was dedicated to the pioneering modernist. No title (linear bird panel) is an oil on cardboard tribute to Brancusi’s most famous bronze, Bird in Space (1928).

To meet city codes, the studio near USC required space for an indoor dumpster. The wasted space inspired No title (room, pots and pans I), resembling an enormous pantry stuffed with oversized pots and pans, enclosed by a Dutch door, a recurring subject in his practice based on a feature in his grandparents’ home he recalled from childhood. Red Room is a mixed media piece with approximately 888 red objects stuffed into the closet-sized space. No title (room, panic doors) is a related piece but is less like a closet than an institutional space with naked walls and a fluorescent light.

“To the outside world, he was definitely an introvert and not the life of the party. In his studio was the place where he was comfortable. There, you would have long conversations about literature, poetry, music, gossip, all kinds of things,” notes Anes, who along with Cherwick, lost a close friend when Therrien passed in 2019. “He was a very interesting and engaging guy.”

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