Robert Therrien emerged in the 1980s as one of the most original sculptors in Los Angeles. Both a painter and sculptor, Therrien works with a vocabulary of forms that repeats itself throughout his oeuvre. His early work consisted of iconic, abstracted wooden forms, reminiscent of coffins, spheres, snowmen, and facets, that poetically mined the line between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Working with quotidian images embedded deep in our culture, he creates two- and three-dimensional works that both exploit and transcend their prosaic associations. At once playful and dark, Therrien torques and tweaks ordinary objects into startling original forms. Walking into one of Therrien’s fully realized installations in like entering a self-contained universe in which the air itself seems to be activated. Rare among a generation strongly influenced by conceptualism, his art is, in the most profound sense, visual – born of an intense desire to see form rendered in particular ways. By masterfully dancing between scale and memory, the bed animates the gallery space.
In 2000, LACMA presented an exhibition of Therrien’s work, organized by Lynn Zelevanksy, which included a group of fifteen black and white single beds that were attached and twisted in corkscrew forms. The white beds no longer survive and only a few of the black beds remain. Mesmerizing and disorienting, these aggrandized everyday objects, including the tortuous black bed in No Title (black beds) (1998), transport the viewer into an Alice in Wonderland-esque fantasy land. The beds were the culmination of a long search for a subject that would lend itself to the creation of a potentially unending sculpture. In the bed form, Therrien found a visual palindrome, a structure whose head and foot were identical, so that multiples of it could, theoretically, be attached to each other ad infinitum. No Title (black beds) embodies all of the features that give Therrien’s art such a powerful grip on the imagination: its capacity to elicit both sensuous pleasure and vague disquiet, the tension it maintains between an inviting familiarity and a stony distance, its ability to produce chuckles as well as gasps of awe. (Lauren Bergman, Assistant Curator Modern Art)
