Robert Therrien

Opening reception for the artist: Friday, May 9th, from 6 to 8pm

Pressetext:

"I have an attraction to the animated aspect of a cartoon that really factors into the work. I think that cartoons are part of a lot of people's consciousness. Cartoons have really reductive body parts. They are reduced to the simplest forms. I end up with images like that." --Robert Therrien

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent sculpture by Robert Therrien.

Therrien is known as an object maker who transforms elements from everyday life into works of art that evoke mythic archetypes. Working both two- and three-dimensionally, he has created a deceptively simple oeuvre that lends itself to psychological interpretation with its evident fascination with childhood, its anxieties and fantasies. While his mentors would seem to include a generation of Pop artists, his work also attests to the impact of Conceptualism as well as folk culture, comic books, and everyday objects.

In 1994 Therrien made a significant breakthrough that influenced all his ensuing work. No Title (Under the Table) was a dramatic shift from the modestly scaled objects that preceded it. The colossal wooden kitchen table and chair set measuring ten feet tall by twenty-six feet in length catapulted the viewer into a Lilliputian universe. In the current exhibition there are four similarly gigantic sculptures, each of which relates to the acts of stacking and folding. No Title (Folding Table and Chairs)comprises four sets of huge yet exacting card tables and chairs in subdued 'institutional' tones of beige, brown, and green. The sheer monumentality of these objects invites the viewer to walk around and beneath them, invoking feelings of child-like play.

In No Title (Stacked Plates) and No Title (Pots and Pans II), Therrien similarly recasts everyday domestic accessories into new proportions, transforming the mundane and necessary accoutrements of domestic life into hyperbolic fantasy. Compositionally, each sculpture is a seemingly precariously balanced tower of large ceramic plates or cooking utensils that stand almost eight feet tall.

No Title (Red Room) (2000-2007) took Therrien seven years to realize, gathering and arranging 650 red objects inside a custom-made closet with Dutch doors. His meticulous assembly of objects both found and made--red shoes, red laces, red lanterns, red sweaters, red bricks, red canisters, and so on—prompts unexpected associations, perhaps with the object/group relationship in Matisse's Red Studio (1911) or the total environment of Cildo Meireles' Red Shift (1967-1984). In Therrien's work, however, the red items are subsumed into the backdrop, the seemingly disparate objects becoming a unified whole.

Robert Therrien was born in Chicago in 1947. His work has been exhibited throughout the world since the 1970s, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. A major drawing retrospective is being prepared by the Kunstmuseum Basel, opening in May 2008. Major public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia; Tate Modern, London; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Broad Contemporary Museum at LACMA, Los Angeles. Therrien lives and works in Los Angeles.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial monograph co-published by Rizzoli with essays by art historian Norman Bryson and independent curator Margit Rowell.

Robert Therrien
Kuratorin: Margit Rowell