This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Robert Therrien is known primarily as a sculptor although he has worked in painting, drawing, printmaking and photography. Inspired by objects in the everyday world, he recycles and reinterprets images in a process of infinite adjustments.
Having earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, he has had solo exhibitions in Belgium and Paris and group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Known predominantly as a sculptor, over the last twenty-five years he has produced a body of work with familiar images embedded deep in American culture such as snowmen, black clouds, and storks carrying bundles.
Therrien has said, "I try to stay with themes or objects or sources I can trace back to my personal history. The further back I can trace something as being meaningful to me in some way or anotherthe more I am attracted to it."
Lynn Zelevansky writes, "Therrien's is an art of paradox and balance. Often occupying a no-man's-land between abstraction and figuration, his extremely refined objects are, at the same time, reminiscent of almost clichéd commonplace cultural symbolsa bird on the wing; a snowman that, turned on its side, becomes a cloud--rigorous formalism coexisting with overt sentiment. In the perfection of their proportions these sculptures suggest rationality and objectivity but their narrative associations denote interiority and personal history. They have the simplicity and primitivism of fables. In their size and physical presence, they insist upon their own three-dimensionality but their contours and finishes soften their profiles creating a figure/ground relationship that can be close to painting."
Source:
www.absolutearts.com
www.broadartfoundation.org
|
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Robert Therrien is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
California Painters
|