Robert Therrien's smashing retrospective is among the year's best museum solo shows

A elephantine stack of dishes from the kitchen, a disembodied array of Daffy-like duckbills, an aggravated tempest unreality of aged rotary dial telephones embedded successful tangled cords — Robert Therrien’s creation covers a batch of varied territory.

Whether helium was making a 3D sculpture to basal connected the floor, a 2D coating to bent connected the wall, oregon a 3D sculpture attached to a partition similar an past frieze, helium managed the aforesaid uncanny effect — objects wherever the purely ocular and the utterly carnal request adjacent time.

At the Broad, “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story” concludes 2025 with 1 of the year’s champion depository solo shows. A smashing retrospective of a seemingly sui generis creator — Therrien died astatine 71 successful 2019 — helium takes a salient spot among a fig of distinctive painters and sculptors since the 1960s and 1970s successful L.A. that don’t look to acceptable comfortably wrong larger categories. Two of them — Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha — person contributed concise reflections connected Therrien’s enactment to the lovely, insightful catalog that accompanies the show.

These days, creation emphasizing taxable substance often shunts signifier to the side, arsenic if the ocular investigation that signifier demands is irrelevant. With Therrien, it’s essential. Students astatine L.A.’s galore celebrated creation schools would payment from spending clip successful the exhibition.

This art’s simultaneous entreaty to the oculus and the hand, formally thin and visually uncluttered, yields a strangely conceptual punch. A consciousness of charismatic beingness — the worldly manifestation of an abstract thought — is inescapable.

Robert Therrien, “No rubric (red chapel relief),” 1991, enamel connected insubstantial and wood

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Start with “No rubric (red chapel relief)” from 1991. The elemental contour of a chapel, its steeple somewhat off-center, stands retired from the partition astir six inches deep. The simplified signifier is the benignant you mightiness spot connected a Christmas paper oregon a stamp.

A spot implicit 9 feet high, and hung much than a ft disconnected the floor, the entity suggests architectural standard without sacrificing an constituent of intimacy, which invites a spectator to prosecute successful adjacent examination. Up close, the agleam crimson relief-sculpture is revealed to diagnostic hand-brushed reddish enamel overgarment implicit paper.

Visible astir intelligibly successful folds astatine the corners, the insubstantial is cautiously affixed to the aboveground of a woody form. Step back, and abruptly the off-centered steeple rising from the boxy signifier beneath looks acquainted successful a precise antithetic way: Make a fist, rise your mediate finger, and the off-centered contour of your manus repeats the signifier hanging connected the wall.

The religion seems to beryllium giving you the digit back.

The designation of a sculpture surreptitiously flipping the vertebrate surely produces a smile. Soon, though, the wisecrack gives mode to much sober ruminations. Every creator is expected to either shingle disconnected oregon renovate convention. Therrien’s generic chapel stands not for immoderate peculiar denomination oregon circumstantial spiritual creed, but simply for the communal world of established doctrine operating passim regular life. That’s what gets the finger.

Therrien isn’t insulting religion. Raised Catholic but long-since lapsed, helium alternatively harnesses an emphatic merger of carnal signifier and fluid reddish colour to conjure a wholly secular imaginativeness of the assemblage and the blood.

Studies for Robert Therrien’s sculptures are included successful the Broad retrospective.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Broad curator Ed Schad notes successful his catalog effort that Therrien made 57 antithetic chapels implicit much than 3 decades. He employed a wide scope of materials successful them — wood, bronze, steel, aluminum, brass, cardboard, paper, canvas, plastic, vellum, photogravure and wallboard. That’s emblematic of the curiosity with which helium investigated the ocular entreaty of art’s carnal potential, which helium began successful the mid-1970s by pouring resin into a puddle connected an asphalt floor, letting it dry, past pulling up the pockmarked pancake and simply pinning it to the wall.

Therrien’s exploratory, creator bird-flipping isn’t parody, similar German creator Anselm Kiefer’s prickly self-portrait photographs raising a Hitler salute successful beforehand of ruined landscapes. It’s much similar Chinese creator Ai Weiwei’s “Study of Perspective” bid of photographs, wherever his outstretched manus raises a mediate digit aimed toward symbolic powerfulness centers — the White House, Tiananmen Square, the Eiffel Tower, the Reichstag, etc. Notably, however, Therrien’s integer rumination connected the hazards embedded wrong unquestioning cultures preceded his chap artist’s by much than a decade. The sensuous worldly breadth of his enactment besides kept redundancy astatine bay, dissimilar Ai’s yet repetitive photographic gestures.

The Broad has 18 Therrien works successful its collection, portion the Museum of Contemporary Art crossed the thoroughfare has 17. The communal denominator betwixt them was the aboriginal enthusiasm of prolific Italian collectors Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza di Biumo, donors to MOCA and friends of Edythe and Eli Broad; they were besides instrumental successful introducing Therrien’s enactment successful Europe. Twenty-five of the exhibition’s much than 120 works travel from the 2 neighboring institutions, portion the remainder are loans gathered from the artist’s property and depository and backstage collections.

Upstairs successful the Broad’s imperishable postulation galleries is Therrien’s 1994 “Under the Table,” an Instagram favourite that’s an astir nonstop replica of his studio’s room table, surrounded by six sturdy woody chairs. The difference: All are enlarged truthful that the ensemble is astir 10 feet gangly and 26 feet long. Downstairs successful the accumulation galleries is his related sculpture of a folding card-table and 4 metallic chairs, rendered successful not dissimilar Brobdingnagian proportions. You’re invited to play underneath, similar you’re 6.

Robert Therrien, “No rubric (folding array and chairs, acheronian brown),” 2007, mixed media

(Joshua White / The Broad)

These tables are not simply big. Instead, they are cautiously calibrated to beryllium ample capable to let a spectator to mentally instrumentality to childhood, erstwhile playing nether a array wherever the grown-ups sat was a communal kid thing, without being truthful ample arsenic to overwhelm a vaporous memory. Each viewer’s recollection is summoned and fixed autonomy.

Weirdly — which is to say, successful emblematic Therrien mode — the tables and chairs are not dissimilar those bird-flipping chapels. In both, a universalized norm gets displayed, yet it’s simultaneously individualized. A chapel and a array are wholly antithetic subjects, but the precision of the signifier propels the contented of each.

That explains his art’s titles — or, to beryllium precise, his determination aboriginal connected to affix each sculpture and coating with the words, “No title.” The casual connection “untitled” was beauteous communal successful art, but it possesses an aerial of disinterest that seems anathema successful the vicinity of a Therrien. “No title” carries the value of a determination having been made. He doesn’t privation to get successful your perception’s way. It’s followed by parentheses that clasp plain descriptions — reddish chapel relief; lipid can; or, folding array and chairs, acheronian brown.

The ceremonial brilliance of Therrien’s creation is everyplace connected view. He made exquisite, hand-rubbed woody keystones, each representing the cardinal chromatic astatine the acme of an arch. A keystone’s angled downward unit connected each broadside locks the larger signifier successful place, paradoxically allowing the arch to emergence up.

Some of Therrien’s keystones bent astatine oculus level connected the wall, inviting adjacent perusal. Others basal upright connected the floor, corresponding to your body. The sculptures lovingly sanctify a keystone’s rational but enigmatic contradiction of mechanics and function.

Robert Therrien’s beard sculptures callback the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.

(Joshua White / The Broad)

A astir eight-foot stack of 26 enlarged achromatic ceramic plates, which deduce from dinnerware the creator recovered successful a shop, stands arsenic a mind-boggling pillar. Made from sleek ceramic epoxy implicit fiberglass, the stacked dishes are piled tilting this mode and that. Walk astir it, and the shifting, light-reflective and -absorbent achromatic forms make an uncanny illusion of the pillar successful jumpy, unstable motion. It’s similar stumbling into an aged Max Fleischer cartoon that has travel to life.

Perhaps the strangest sculptures successful the amusement are a enactment of flowing beards, awesome of maturity and wisdom, which deduce from the long, lavish 1 the large Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi sported. Born successful the 19th century, Brancusi made his vocation successful 20th period Paris, his enactment the epitome of Modernist abstraction. Therrien’s beards — fashioned from synthetic hair, plaster, stainless alloy oregon aluminum — bent connected wardrobe stands from hooks that would spell implicit the wearer’s ears arsenic portion of a costume.

Some beards are large capable for a giant, befitting Brancusi’s outsize creator reputation. Others are doll-sized, cleanable for a modern personage souvenir, similar Barbie’s Ken. Like past Egyptian pharaohs who wore mendacious beards to signify their transportation to Osiris, deity of the underworld, oregon criminals wishing to change their quality to debar the cops, we are challenged by sculptures representing the powerfulness of artifice.

“What is existent is not the outer form, but the essence of things,” Brancusi famously said. So, ever the unconventional philosopher, Therrien made existent mendacious beards that embody the essence of that. Form and content, the ocular and the physical, make art’s spellbinding treble helix. Think of these eccentric beards arsenic Therrien’s self-portraits.