Robert Therrien: This Is a Story

Moving beyond his well-known monumental installations of tables and chairs, this tribute to Robert Therrien analyzes his understudied later works

Published with The Broad.

This book presents a fresh, accessible and dynamic look at the work of American artist Robert Therrien (1947-2019), surveying over 40 years of his influential work, notably his underseen and understudied late works. Organized chronologically and thematically, emphasizing Therrien’s iterative artistic practice of exploring sets of themes over time, the volume speaks to the nature of memory and how it is shaped by space, time and materials, placing his practice within the history of recent sculpture in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The book showcases Therrien’s personal vocabulary of forms as they become a personal language of continuous creation for the artist over time. A single Therrien gesture can expand, contract, change materially or seamlessly transform into other images entirely. At the heart of Therrien’s practice is a sense of artistic animation, by turns fun, playful and serious.