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

The exhibition traces Therrien’s evolution from small drawings to large-scale sculptural environments that redefine spatial experience. Photo: Joshua White

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.

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“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........

© Observer

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