ART-PREVIEW:Robert Therrien
Robert Therrien enjoys creating unexpected, surreal, and dreamy worlds out of simple, familiar objects and does so by manipulating their size, color, material, and juxtaposition. For example, one of his most popular exhibits, “Table and Four Chairs”, consists of chairs and a table blown up to enormous sizes. When looking at the exhibit, the viewer feels as if he or she is looking through the eyes of a young child.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery
Robert Therrien in his solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York presents new sculptures and works on paper. Robert Therrien was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. He moved south to study at the University of Southern California, where he earned his MFA degree. Originally, Therrien sculpted with ordinary objects, such as doors, chairs, plates, coffins, and jugs, but he later began to experiment with wood, bronze, copper, and other materials. During the ‘80s the artist began to make objects with simple, recognisable shapes such as jugs, coffins and doors, transforming them through a variety of media including copper, wood and bronze. This developed his engagement with the notion of the found object, addressed most explicitly in his found brick paper drawings. His work with changing scale began in the early’90s. Some objects he uses are found, some are made by and for the artist. Therrien’s images and the objects he selects expose the hidden drama of the unnoticed, invisible, physical and mental relationships which exist in the world of human beings, between human beings and between the objects they create to help them live their lives. Through shifts in perspective and scale, Therrien renders ordinary experience uncanny. This effect is demonstrated in his constructions of interior spaces, such as “Red Room” (2000–07), which holds some 900 red objects in a closet-sized space “Transparent Room” (2010) contains a bed, clothing, a mirror, parts of a chandelier, packing materials, and more. However, Therrien renders his greenhouse-like structure and its contents totally transparent in glass and plastic. In the manner of set design, some of the contained objects are found, others made. Therrien’s rooms impede the viewer’s ability to engage with space in any comfortable way. Meticulously assembled features of common industrial design allow one to stand in front of architectural vistas. At Gagosian Gallery, elevated above ground level and cut away to show interiors, the rooms become impenetrable replicas of reality, each is like a mise-en-scène or readymade. “No title (room, panic doors)” (2013-14) presents a set of doors in a room filled with fluorescent light. In “No title (paneled room)” (2017), tambourines rest silent on the floor of a room paneled in hardwood, and a ladder leads to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Each room transports the viewer out of the gallery and into a new narrative situation, prompting connections between material details and their subconscious associations.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 6/4-26/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
