Robert Therrien

Robert Therrien (1947–2019) worked across a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, and installation. Over the course of five decades, he developed an array of motifs based on memory, distinguishing his carefully constructed imagery through a deeply imaginative sensibility, at once familiar and out of reach, allowing for multivalent, open-ended narratives to unfold. The artist submitted everyday objects and forms to a process of abstraction before bringing them back into focus in a new way, or—as in later works—enlarged objects such as tables, chairs, and stacked plates to an uncanny scale. Therrien emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, part of a generation of artists who were countering the detachment of the minimal and conceptual works coming out of New York with an accessible, distinctly West Coast vernacular. As curator Lynn Zelevansky describes, “Robert Therrien has created remarkably beautiful objects that transform elements from popular culture and everyday life into forms that have the timeless clarity of myths or folktales. Working with familiar images embedded deep in the culture … he creates two- and three-dimensional works that both exploit and transcend their prosaic associations.”¹

Therrien was born in Chicago. He studied photography and printmaking at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara before earning a graduate degree at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1974. The artist remained in Los Angeles for the next forty-five years as an active member of the Southern California art scene.

Therrien’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions since the mid-1970s. His earliest presentations were held at Ruth S. Schaffner Gallery, Los Angeles (1975; 1977; 1978) and Holly Solomon Gallery, New York (1978). In 1979, the artist received his first institutional solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In the proceeding two decades, solo exhibitions of Therrien’s work continued to be held at significant institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1991); The Broad Foundation, Los Angeles (1994; 1997); Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, Montreal (1996; traveled to Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary, Canada); and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2000). During this period, the artist was also exhibiting steadily with notable galleries, including Leo Castelli, New York, and Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf.

In 2000, a large-scale international solo exhibition was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, before traveling to SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico. Additional solo presentations of Therrien’s work have been held at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh (2004); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2006; 2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2007); Kunstmuseum Basel (2008); Tate Modern, London (2009; 2018); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010); De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2011); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011); and Denver Art Museum (2016).

Robert Therrien: Works 1975–1995, the first major European exhibition to focus on the earliest two decades of the artist’s career, was presented at Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London, in 2016. In 2022, the solo exhibition Robert Therrien: at that time was on view in Seoul at the Gana Art Center. The Broad, Los Angeles, one of the first institutions to add works by Therrien to its permanent collection, presented Robert Therrien: This is a Story in 2025, marking the largest museum exhibition of the artist’s work to date.

Work by Therrien is held in institutional collections worldwide, such as The Broad, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Dallas Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kunstmuseum Basel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

^{[1] Lynn Zelevansky, “No Title: The Work of Robert Therrien,” in Robert Therrien. Exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2000), p. 47.}