All Photos By Gail

Robert Therrien  (1947 – 2019 ) was born in Chicago but made Los Angeles is home for nearly 50 years, living and creating art there. He was part of the city’s tight-knit and experimental art circles of the 1970s, contributing to the rise of fabrication as a way of making increasingly complex works. His career spans much of the recent development of art in Los Angeles, including its escalating prominence as a center of global art making.

The artist’s  outsize renderings of kitchen items reference both the tradition of sculpture as monuments and the tradition of the still life. In Stacked Plates (White) from 1993,  he presents a sculpture of Buffalo China, industrially made and popular dishes from the early 1900s. As a painter would depict plates or bowls (often filled with fruit), Therrien offers his  plates as a tribute to everyday life.

The stacked plates also become shaky, and even vertiginous. As one walks around them, they give the illusion of movement and unsteadiness while staying still.

Therrien became known for his room-size Installations and large sculptures of pots and pans, dishes, and folding tables. Central to his work as the notion of scale, specifically how experiences and memories can impact one’s relationship to an object’s size, shape, and meaning.

Photographed in The Broad Museum as part of the Exhibit Robert Therrien: This is a Story.