The exhibition will showcase the work of “Under the Table” creator Robert Therrien. (photo by Joshue White)

This fall, The Broad presents “Robert Therrien: This is a Story,” the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s work to date, on view Nov. 22 to April 5. Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation will showcase Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols – from enormous tables, chairs and dishes to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds and chapels – as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated for close to 30 years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

“Robert Therrien has longstanding ties to The Broad and was one of the very first L.A.-based artists to enter The Broad collection decades ago in its first, formative years. His massive sculpture ‘Under the Table’ has captivated visitors to our museum’s galleries since the day The Broad opened in 2015, as a surreally enlarged wooden table offering layers of the artist’s intellectual and art historical inquiry within an aura of domestic familiarity,” said Joanne Heyler, founding director and president of The Broad. “For our visitors who know and love ‘Under the Table,’ this ambitious show will reveal a deeper and wide-lens look into the completely unique world Therrien created a Los Angeles-based body of work that reshaped contemporary sculpture.”

Therrien (1947–2019) was born in Chicago and relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s to complete an MFA degree at the University of Southern California. Despite the prominence of conceptual and minimalist practices at the time, he developed his own artistic vernacular that saw the infinite potential of ordinary objects across basic forms and their three-dimensional counterparts, varying in size, color and detail. A single Therrien gesture can expand, contract, change materially or seamlessly transform into other images entirely. A chapel will become an oil can; the oil can will become a pitcher; the pitcher, a cone, then morphing into a witch hat. At the heart of Therrien’s practice is a sense of artistic animation, by turns fun, playful and serious.

Tickets to “Robert Therrien: This is a Story” will become available by visiting thebroad.org. A full schedule of programming with additional details will be announced in the coming months.

The Broad is located at 221 S. Grand Ave. For information, visit thebroad.org.