Robert Therrien, Liverpool

About

The American artist Robert Therrien came to prominence in the early 1980s for making objects with simple, recognizable shapes such as pitchers, coffins and doors, all explored through a variety of materials including copper, wood and bronze. The artist began playing with scale in the 1990s, and this has remained a key means by which he defamiliarises everyday objects, endowing them with a fresh and astonishing power. His appropriation of domestic items for the purposes of artistic composition recalls the classical still-life, but his use of proportion, material and space connects his work to architecture.

This major exhibition, entitled Robert Therrien: Smoke Signals, featured the signature installation No Title (Table and Four Chairs) in Tate Liverpool's Wolfson Room, as well as other large scale sculptures and a selection of Therrien’s surprisingly intimate works on paper.