Robert Therrien
This is a Story
The Broad, Los Angeles
November 22, 2025–April 5, 2026

This fall, The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s widely-adored work to date, on view November 22, 2025 to April 5, 2026. 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 out of for close to thirty 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 will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

Mondi Possibili
Henni Alftan, John Baldessari, Cao Fei, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Lucy Dodd, Robert Elfgen, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Karen Kilimnik, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, David Ostrowski, Michail Pirgelis, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Scheibitz, Andreas Schulze, Hyun-Sook Song, Robert Therrien, Rosemarie Trockel, Kaari Upson, Andrea Zittel
August 31–September 14, 2023
Seoul

Mondi Possibili highlights the interplay between art and design and explores the many ways in which experimentation with material, technique and scale can reveal the hidden narratives, quiet drama and humor in the everyday items that furnish our lives as well as our imaginations. Connected through a paradigm of the possible, all artworks on show examine familiar objects – citing, celebrating, adapting or appropriating them – offering surprising, playful or unsettling approaches that open up a range of “possible worlds.” This will be the fourth edition of Sprüth Magers’ Mondi Possibili – first titled by Pasquale Leccese – showcasing significant themes in the selected artists’ works as well as the gallery’s longstanding heritage. Its three previous iterations were presented in 1989, 2006 and 2007 in Cologne, where the gallery’s history is firmly rooted, and art and design have intersected for many decades.

Robert Therrien
November 16, 2011–January 21, 2012
Berlin

The artist’s second exhibition at the Berlin gallery will feature a selection of seminal sculptures and will include a major new installation work entitled Transparent Room, 2010.

In the early 1980's, Robert Therrien became known for transforming simple, generic objects from his own environment into sculpture using a variety of media including copper, wood and bronze. While the depicted objects made from templates were ‘universal’ and recognizable to all, the subject matter of Therrien’s work often derived from personal childhood memories such as the nostalgic Dutch doors of his grandparents’ house to a lonely coffin evoking early deaths in his family, all of which were reinvented into concrete form.

Robert Therrien
Works on paper
May 2–June 20, 2009
Berlin

Therrien’s works on paper are often designated as drawings, yet they encompass and sometimes fuse together a range of media, including drawing, printing, painting, collage and photography. They are largely characterised by presenting recurrent motifs as simple yet striking forms, and allowing them to float unanchored within the surface of the paper. Demonstrating Therrien’s longstanding interest in cartoons and graphic visual culture, his images are defined by a softness of line and an appealing vibrancy which engage and intrigue the viewer, as they rest without context but are nonetheless curiously animated.

Uneasy Angel / Imagine Los Angeles
Doug Aitken, John Baldessari, Patterson Beckwith, Lecia Dole-Recio, Jack Goldstein, Richard Hawkins, Patrick Hill, Sister Corita Kent, Norman M. Klein, Barbara Kruger, David Lamelas, John McCracken, Matthew Monahan, Lari Pittman, Sterling Ruby, Allen Ruppersberg, Lara Schnitger, Kim Schoenstadt, Paul Sietsema, Catherine Sullivan, Robert Therrien, Pae White
curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen
September 14–November 3, 2007
Munich

Uneasy Angel / Imagine Los Angeles is a thematic exhibition comprising the creative production of contemporary artists, writers, and filmmakers living and working in Los Angeles. In light of Umberto Eco’s and Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, the exhibition perceives Los Angeles as just such a place—with unclear boundaries separating reality and the imaginary.

Robert Therrien
February 13–April 3, 2004
Munich

Robert Therrien
curated by Anthony d'Offay
February 11–April 3, 2004
London

This exhibition, which has been curated and installed by Anthony d’Offay, includes a number of major sculptures and a selection of drawings from the last ten years. Visitors to a Robert Therrien exhibition are immediately aware of entering a personal world, and above all a world of the unexpected. They are confronted by shapes and objects both familiar and strange. It is a world of deceptively childish charm and logic, where ideas can be literally translated into reality. Outward calm hints at dramatic possibilities. Sometimes inanimate things can become strikingly animated. Familiar shapes and substances change. Soft and light become hard and heavy and size seems out of control.