Artist's hidden note cards reveal why his sculptures still mesmerize visitors

When Robert Therrien died in 2019, he left behind a stack of small note cards—each one a labeled line drawing. One card was different: a paragraph of redacted dashes, followed by five words: "this is a story."

For curator Ed Schad, organizing the first major retrospective of Therrien's work since his death, that card unlocked something essential about the artist's entire practice. Therrien made sculptures of ordinary objects—stacked plates, tables, doors—but rendered them strange by changing their scale. A five-inch light switch. A sixteen-foot-tall beard made of stainless steel. Standing beside them, your sense of proportion fractures. The familiar becomes uncanny.

But here's what made Therrien different from his peers: he refused to explain what anything meant. "He didn't title his sculptures or tell people what they meant to him," said Paul Cherwick, Therrien's assistant for seventeen years. "He wanted people to make their own connections, find their own way in."

This matters because it's the opposite of how most artists work. Therrien believed the meaning lived in what you brought to the object, not in what he'd embedded in it. A towering stack of plates doesn't evoke childhood because Therrien says it does. It evokes childhood because you remember the weight of a plate in your small hand, the precarious thrill of stacking them higher than you should.

Courtesy the Broad Art Foundation

The Paradox of Familiar and Strange

Therrien lived and worked in Los Angeles from 1974 onward, which shaped everything. The city's fabrication scene, its industrial design culture, its postwar production ethos—all fed his vision. But unlike the Minimalists and Pop artists dominating LA's discourse, Therrien married formal restraint with emotional weight. His sculptures are perfectly proportioned, rationally constructed. Yet they're saturated with memory.

He began each piece the same way: drawings, photographs, then careful experimentation with scale. The key wasn't size alone—it was relationship. "Locating where the memory lives in relation to the sculpture," Schad explained. Too small, and it's a toy. Too large, and it becomes spectacle. Each work had to occupy a precise perceptual space.

Therrien repeated the same forms obsessively throughout his forty-year career. A snowman in one decade becomes a cloud in the next, which becomes the wing of a bird in a painting, which becomes the fold of a wooden bow. "It's easy to confuse something from 1977 with 2017," Cherwick said. But this wasn't refinement toward some perfect version. Therrien was working all the way through a form, again and again, finding new resonance each time.

Photo Joshua White/JWPictures.com/Courtesy Robert Therrien Estate

The retrospective opening at the Broad in Los Angeles on November 22 spans 120 works across 10,000 square feet. Rather than organizing chronologically, Schad created an elliptical layout that mirrors how Therrien's mind worked—sculptures, drawings, and paintings echoing each other, forms transfiguring from one medium to another. The exhibition even recreates sections of his downtown LA studio: the muddy-green walls, the chalkboard rails, the stacked pots and pans that became architecture.

©Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum of Art

What's striking is how invisible Therrien has remained. His most famous work, "Under the Table," sits in the Broad's collection. Nine out of ten visitors call it their favorite—but they don't know who made it. The artist disliked interviews, avoided cameras, and essentially dissolved into his work. That anonymity suited him. Yet it also makes this survey feel urgent in a particular way: it reconnects artwork to maker without dissolving the mystery that makes both matter.

Curator Schad frames the show as something else too—a counterproposal to our current moment. "To present slowness instead of speed, care instead of frenzy," he said, "feels pretty radical." In an age of generative AI, social media churn, and streaming saturation, Therrien's practice offers something almost subversive: objects that demand you slow down, remember, and make meaning yourself.

Therrien left behind that note card with the redacted paragraph. The story it tells belongs entirely to you.