Large and Delightful – Robert Therrien at The Broad – Genie Davis
The encompassing and frankly enchanting exhibition of Robert Therrien’s work, This is a Story, is now at The Broad through April 5th. It’s a lot of fun and its playfully revelatory, the largest museum presentation of the late artist’s work to date, featuring more than 120 pieces spanning five decades of of creative evolution.
It’s an immersive and tranformative exhibition: start by walking in and circling Therrien’s towering sculpture of white ceramic plates, which seem to reolve with you. Each piece seems to take a surreal delight in reshaping the viewer’s approach to the world, inviting us to reconceive how we feel about the every day objects that inhabit our lives.
Among the oversized and reconceptioned subjects are the artist’s magically mammoth “No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown),” which may make viewers feel as if they dropped in from the set of Honey I Shrunk the Kids.
There is the whimsically twisted “No title (black beds)” a sinuous twist of plastic and enamel; a steel and enamel series of shadows and phone cords, a sculpture of looped wire, an oil can and a steeple with similar slender points and peaks. Work is untitled as the artist is more concerned with connecting themes and common objects writ into meticulously towering poetic forms.
Can work be both surreal and comforting? Therrien appears to have it both ways, never more evident than with his recurring theme of the Underwood deviled ham logo of a red devil and pitchfork, found on large paper works, silkscreens with random tiny devils, and on a massive panel of red dots that the artist is said to have envisioned after using his own asthma inhaler.
Working in his own massive studio space in Los Angeles, the artist retooled his childhood memories and sensations to create them writ large in both form and imagination.
His “Untitled (room, pots and pans I),” spills cooking items from a mammoth pantry with a dutch door, while his “Red Room” offers a mixed media work featuring 888 red objects stuffed into a space the size of a closet. More open, and allowing viewers to intimately explore this “set” is Not title (room panic doors) which resembles a space in an institution – hospital, jail perhaps, with bare walls and an unattractive florescent light.
In some ways, Therrien’s work resembles being perpetually on a movie set or having stepped down into Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole.
There are snowmen and chapels, dishes and doorways, reflective pitchers as sleek as they are the overpowering, all the enormity of domestic objects in an oversized childhood imagination reenvisioned as art. The Broad’s encompassing show allows viewers to feel a sense of wonder in the everyday, to dance through a wild world of memory as vast as its scale.
It invites viewers to essentially reconsider how even ordinary objects can shape our inner lives, or perhaps more to the point, how our inner lives can reshape the everyday into something quite wonderful. Referencing both memory and personal history, Therrien’s work is tactile, energetic, and conceptually elegant.
And as to the exhibition itself, it is, pun intended, a monumental show, both accessible and thoughtful, enlightening viewers on the artist’s history, and providing outsized delights. Go enjoy.
- Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis