Robert Therrien

The Californian artist Robert Therrien has been highly renowned for his large-size sculptures and room installations since the 1980s. Besides these three-dimensional works Therrien has created also a vast oeuvre of paintings, drawings, prints, collages and photography. Therrien's works, many of them named "No Title", are complex and elude a simple classification. Nor does the artist distinguish precisely between the media and techniques he uses. Painting, drawing, etching, collage and photography are often closely intertwined within a single picture. For his motifs he draws on existing things from everyday life. These motifs exist in reality and in images we see, or in our memory.The particular appeal of Therrien's subtle and humorous works on paper emerges from his reduction of motifs to shapes of utmost simplicity. Their arrangement on paper and the precision of their physical appearance places them in an unexpected light, stirring personal memories, associations and rediscoveries, and giving them an almost literary, narrative quality.