Artist Robert Therrien passes away at the age of seventy-one
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, October 31, 2024


Artist Robert Therrien passes away at the age of seventy-one
Robert Therrien (American, born 1947). No title (folding table and chairs, beige), 2006. Paint, metal, and fabric. Table: 96 x 110 x 110 inches (243.84 x 279.4 x 279.4 cm); four chairs, each (unfolded): 104 x 64 x 72 inches (264.16 x 162.56 x 182.88 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund, 2007. © 2006 Robert Therrien. Photograph by Tom Loonan.



NEW YORK, NY.- Over the past four decades, Robert Therrien (1947-2019) cultivated an expansive vernacular of forms drawn from memory and the everyday. Seemingly simple subjects-including snowmen, bows, and oilcans-acquire multiple levels of reference and association, while outsized sculptures of stacks of plates, tables and chairs, and beards shift between the ordinary and the surreal. The repetitive perfecting of chosen motifs is central to his work, imbuing objects and images with intentionality and a latent sense of the unattainable.

Born in Chicago, Therrien emerged on the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene in the late 1970s after completing graduate school at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and studying photography at the Brooks Institute, Santa Barbara, California. At a time when the dominance of Minimalism and Conceptualism was being challenged, Therrien adopted certain formal aspects of these movements, yet allowed his pared-down sculptures and monochrome wall reliefs to take on poetic reference and implied narratives. Like the work of fellow artists John McCracken and Vija Celmins, Therrien's work found curatorial significance for being uncategorizable, his particular style constituting a submerged realism that subtly explored the human condition.

Therrien was represented by Leo Castelli in New York and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf throughout the 1980s and 1990s, during which time his work received increasing international recognition. In 1984 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presented the first exhibition of his stand-alone rooms: six re-creations of his Pico Boulevard studio, complete with the artworks therein. The studio would continue to be a subject and conceptual catalyst throughout Therrien's oeuvre, in which art and domestic life are deeply intertwined. In 1990 he moved to a two-story building that he designed and built according to the layout of the earlier Pico Boulevard studio. This space serves as home, repository, workshop, and gallery, allowing Therrien to reference his past works as well as items from everyday life-taking them from two to three dimensions or from small- to large-scale and back again. His sculptures of oversized pots and pans, for example, are modeled after those in his own kitchen, and his sculptures of oilcans evolve from earlier renderings of a chapel, its steeple transformed into a long conical spout.

In 1991 the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, presented a survey of Therrien's work since 1969, revealing the evolution of many of his motifs as they vacillate between the familiar and the abstract. The exhibition included a sculpture comprised of three worn white cabinets, which simultaneously echoes the seriality of minimalist sculpture and the intimate tactility and history of found objects. These same cabinets were included in Documenta IX (1992), two years before Therrien presented his first gigantic table and chairs at in SITE94, San Diego (1994).

In the early 2000s, Therrien continued to reinvent his unique vocabulary, revealing influences including Surrealism, early Hollywood cartoons, childhood myths, and period-specific design. Survey exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2013), and Parasol unit, London (2016), revealed Therrien's investigations of what he calls "figure-ground play," wherein an image can evoke many things at once or seem to advance and retreat simultaneously. These chromatic and perspectival effects were expanded in his later room works, in which objects and spaces are reduced not in form but through Therrien's choice of materials, monochromatic palettes, and presentation of either crowded or eerily sparse interiors.

At the Contemporary Austin (2015) and Gagosian's West 24th Street location in New York (2017), Therrien exhibited single, meticulously constructed rooms, evolving from the earlier studio rooms. Transparent Room (2010) is a structure made of found factory windows and filled with hundreds of sourced or made plastic and glass objects, while No title (room, panic doors) (2013-14) presents a hallway painted in institutional light blue, with panic doors at one end and a fluorescent fixture on the ceiling. These works evolved out of the earlier Red Room (2000-07), in which nearly one thousand red objects (both found and made) are carefully arranged in a room that can be seen through a white Dutch door. Now held in the Tate collection, Red Room was created over a seven-year period in a small closet under the stairs in Therrien's studio.










Today's News

June 19, 2019

Palmer Museum opens intriguing exhibition on American lithography

Picasso leads in London: Monumental late work takes top billing as 20th Century Week total passes £59 million

Rare 18th-century Thai Buddhist manuscripts and Books go on display following restoration.

Lowry's Cricket Match sells for £1.2 million

London gallery chief quits after Israel spyware report

Gagosian opens an exhibition of works by Ed Ruscha and Louis Michel Eilshemius

Artist Robert Therrien passes away at the age of seventy-one

Door to legendary Berlin techno club gets museum digs

Tate Liverpool opens first UK Keith Haring show

Huntington acquires works by several African American artists, early abstract oils, and a Tiffany chair

Exhibition explores personal visions of reality in 20th and 21st-Century America

Christie's announces the sale of the collection: Paul Destribats, Bibliothèque des avant-gardes

Opening date announced for Aberdeen Art Gallery

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announces new appointments and curatorial promotions

New York art collector Lio Malca presents a large-scale exhibition by Kenny Scharf

photo basel 2019: Show report

'Moon Rock Hunter' on quest to track down Apollo gifts

Guild Hall welcomes Kristin Eberstadt as Director of Philanthropy

UAE gift helps French palace reopen 'forgotten theatre'

The World Illustration Awards 2019 category winners announced

Exhibition brings together works created by Robert Mapplethorpe in New York City between 1978 and 1984

Exhibition at Jeu de Paume offers a sweeping overview of Sally Mann's career

A royal family Rolex watch Sells for over $300,000

Flower Power at the PalaisPopulaire




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful