There is a table in the galleries of the Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles that you cannot sit at. You cannot reach it, cannot touch its surface, cannot pull out one of its chairs. The table and chairs are the right shape, the right color, the right material — and they are nine feet tall. You walk among the legs like a child who has wandered into a room built for giants, and something shifts in your perception that does not easily shift back.
This is the essential experience of Robert Therrien’s art, and it is on full display in Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s work to date, now on view at the Broad through April 5, 2026. The retrospective spans five decades of a singular practice rooted in Los Angeles — a career that quietly and persistently asked what ordinary things look like when you really look at them, and what happens to meaning when scale is unmoored from expectation.
Therrien, who was born in Chicago in 1947 and died in Los Angeles in 2019, spent most of his adult life in the city that would become inseparable from his vision. He arrived in the late 1960s and found in LA what many artists of his generation found: space, light, and a certain freedom from the orthodoxies of the New York art world. He studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and began developing a practice that was from the start concerned with the archeology of the familiar — with the way certain shapes and objects accumulate meaning simply by being present in a life.
His early works are small and quiet — drawings, paintings, and objects that feel like memories of things rather than depictions of them. A hat. A cross. An arch. A snowman. These forms recur throughout his work with the insistence of dreams, and Therrien treated them with corresponding seriousness: these were not decorative motifs but loaded signs, forms that had somehow lodged themselves in the collective unconscious and refused to leave. His approach was phenomenological before it was sculptural — an investigation into how we recognize, and what recognition feels like.
The sculptures for which Therrien became most celebrated arrived later, and they arrived at a scale that changed everything. His oversized objects — the famous table and chairs, stacked plates taller than a person, an enormous can of beans rendered in meticulous detail — are not simply big versions of small things. They are ontological displacements, experiences that force the body to recalibrate its relationship to space, memory, and meaning.
This is a Story brings together works spanning the full arc of this journey, from the intimate early pieces to the monumental late sculptures, and the effect is cumulative and powerful. You move through the exhibition the way you move through a half-remembered place, recognizing things that shouldn’t be familiar, unsettled by the certainty that you’ve been here before.
The Broad is an apt home for this retrospective. Eli and Edythe Broad were among Therrien’s earliest and most committed collectors, and the museum holds significant works from across his career. Situated in downtown Los Angeles, a few blocks from the towers of Bunker Hill and the cultural corridor of Grand Avenue, the Broad occupies a piece of the city that Therrien himself inhabited and observed for decades. There is something right about seeing his work here, in this city, in this building.
Los Angeles runs through Therrien’s work in ways that are not always immediately legible but become undeniable over time. This is not the LA of palm trees and freeways — the picturesque vernacular that has attracted and seduced so many artists. It is something more interior and more ambient: the quality of domestic space in a city built around the private home, the particular flatness of light in the basin, the sense of objects existing in suspension, slightly unreal, slightly too vivid, in the Southern California sun.
Therrien was part of a generation of LA artists who came of age in the shadow of the Light and Space movement and absorbed its lessons about perception, materiality, and the phenomenology of looking without reproducing its aesthetics. Where James Turrell and Robert Irwin dissolved objects in light, Therrien made objects more present, more themselves, more insistently there. His art is about the thingness of things — about the way a table is not just a surface but a repository of time, a theater of domestic life, a shape that the mind returns to.
His oversized sculptures are also, quietly, about childhood — about the experience of being small in a world built for adults, of looking up at furniture that fills the visual field, of the uncanny authority that ordinary objects hold over young perception. In this sense they are deeply autobiographical, even when they appear most impersonal. Therrien spent his career making the private legible without making it confessional, translating felt experience into formal experience with extraordinary tact.
Robert Therrien: This is a Story is an overdue celebration of one of the most original and undersung artists of the postwar American canon. He was never fashionable in the way that some of his contemporaries were fashionable; he did not fit easily into movements or manifestos; his work asked for patience and rewarded it slowly. But the rewards are real and lasting.
To walk through this retrospective is to be reminded that art can be simultaneously monumental and intimate, conceptually rigorous and emotionally direct, deeply strange and instantly recognizable. Therrien worked in Los Angeles for fifty years, and this city is in the work — in its scales, its silences, its stubborn attention to the beauty of things that are simply, irreducibly there.
Robert Therrien: This is a Story is on view at the Broad, Los Angeles, through April 5, 2026.
