Exhibitions
Remembering at Scale: Robert Therrien at The Broad Los Angeles
At The Broad, monumentality is nothing new, yet Robert Therrien: This Is a Story approaches scale not as spectacle, but as a subtle emotional strategy. The exhibition which is the largest survey of Robert Therrien’s work to date brings together more than 120 works spanning five decades, tracing how the artist transformed everyday objects into vessels of memory and perception.
Therrien is best known for enlarging domestic furniture tables, chairs, plates, cupboards, into architectural presences. These objects are instantly recognizable, even comforting but their exaggerated proportions quietly can destabilize the viewer. Standing beside a towering chair or walking beneath a monumental table, one becomes acutely aware of one’s own physical smallness, recalling a time when the world felt oversized and uncertain. By enlarging domestic forms to architectural dimensions, Therrien invites viewers into a bodily experience of recollection, one that reactivates childhood perspectives and personal histories. Across five decades, recurring motifs form a symbolic language through which the artist narrates his evolving relationship to place, identity, and material life.
This sensation is most vividly embodied in Under the Table (1994), the first artwork installed at the museum and still one of its most beloved. Crawling beneath its vast structure, visitors momentarily adopt a child’s-eye perspective. The experience is playful, but also reflective. What appears simple at first gradually reveals unexpected emotional and psychological depth, inviting repeated encounters and reconsideration.
Rather than following a conventional chronological model, This Is a Story unfolds as an evolving narrative. Early and late works converse across time, suggesting that Therrien’s artistic life was shaped less by linear progress than by continual revisiting and rethinking. The exhibition reads like a visual autobiography composed of objects, spaces, and sensations. The show also gains resonance from its local context. After working near downtown Los Angeles for nearly thirty years, Therrien returns symbolically to the city through this major presentation. His sculptures feel deeply rooted in lived experience, shaped by domestic environments and everyday rituals rather than by artistic grandstanding.
One of the exhibition’s greatest strengths is its accessibility for all where children are drawn instinctively to the oversized furniture. and adults recognize fragments of their own domestic histories. In an era often dominated by visual excess, Therrien’s work remains quietly persuasive. By enlarging the everyday, he does not make it strange. He makes it visible again, reminding us that some of the most enduring artistic experiences are rooted in the simplest forms such as a table, a chair, a place to hide, a moment of looking up at something that once seemed impossibly large.
