A giant stack of dishes from the kitchen, a disembodied array of Daffy-like duckbills, an angry storm cloud of old rotary dial telephones embedded in tangled cords — Robert Therrien’s art covers a lot of varied territory.
Whether he was making a 3D sculpture to stand on the floor, a 2D painting to hang on the wall, or a 3D sculpture attached to a wall like an ancient frieze, he managed the same uncanny result — objects where the purely visual and the utterly physical demand equal time.
At the Broad, “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story” concludes 2025 with one of the year’s best museum solo shows. A smashing retrospective of a seemingly sui generis artist — Therrien died at 71 in 2019 — he takes a prominent place among a number of distinctive painters and sculptors since the 1960s and 1970s in L.A. that don’t seem to fit comfortably within larger categories. Two of them — Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha — have contributed concise reflections on Therrien’s work to the lovely, insightful catalog that accompanies the show.