May 28 – July 18, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, May 28, 2015, 6-8 pm
Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Robert Therrien, an exhibition of artworks by the artist in his second solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery.
Robert Therrien has spent more than 40 years developing a set of iconic forms he repeats across various media, including drawing, photography, and sculpture. These forms are distilled from everyday objects like a keyhole, a chapel, a coffin, or a snowman.
When pared of extraneous details and named No Title, the associative potential of these forms comes to the fore. The outline of a chapel might resemble that of an oilcan; a snowman comprised of three stacked circles when turned on its side becomes a bulging cloud. Familiar shapes evoke other objects and then fall back into abstraction. Therrien’s work exists in slippages between similar forms, shifts from two to three dimensions and back, and vacillations in scale and perspective.
The drawings in this exhibition are centralized and silhouetted forms on cream-colored paper, framed in similar-colored wood, as are most of Therrien’s works on paper.
The Contemporary Austin is currently exhibiting an outsized table and chairs (three times larger than life) and three “rooms” that feel like large, three-dimensional drawings.
While Therrien finds inspiration in such disparate and specific sources as early cartoons, Case Study Houses, and American metal engineering, his work skims lightly between abstraction and representation.
Robert Therrien was born in Chicago in 1947. Most recently he has had solo museum exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), Broad Contemporary Art Museum at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Tate Liverpool (England), and De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art (Netherlands). Some institutions that have his work in their collections include the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Tate Gallery (London), and Centre Pompidou (Paris). Therrien lives and works in Los Angeles.