<p>The artwork of Robert Therrien makes reference to commonplace, even cliched motifs - a snowman, a cloud, a Dutch door, a bird in flight, a stack of plates. In the perfection of their proportions and the simplicity of their forms these works - sculptures, reliefs, and two-dimensional pieces - partake of a cool objectivity. Their narrative associations, however, give them the intimacy of personal history. They possess a wholesome familiarity, yet their often huge size gives them an uncanny; disquieting quality.<br>In this volume, which accompanies the exhibition Robert Therrien and examines the artist's work of the past decade, curator Lynn Zelevansky explores the transformation of forms that has been the hallmark of Therrien's artistic process and situates his work within contemporary art practice. Essayist Thomas Frick discusses the work vis-a-vis the formalist tradition in art and examines the paradoxical nature of its abstract and figurative aspects. In the volume's third and final essay, art historian Norman Bryson investigates the visceral effect of Therrien's sculpture on the viewer, relating its effects to the corporeal invasions and restitutions found in animated cartoons.</p>

Robert Therrien

Arts & Photography

Zelevansky, Lynn

Frick, Thomas

Individual Artists

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Fiction. "THE IRON BOYS is a novel in the form of an eccentric monologue—indeed a rambling oral history—by one Corbel Penner who brings the reader, through his unique language, obsessions, and relationships, deeply inside the mentality of another time. Corbel becomes a member of a secret, quasi-Luddite band of rebels in the early 1800s. The center point of his circuitous narrative is the destruction of George Withy's textile factory by a motley band of 'rebels against the future.' The actual Luddites, and their three years of machine breaking, are to this day mysterious, and I've taken that historical murk as license to postulate a deeper, perhaps alchemical layer of transformation. Rather than narrate 'historical events' from an omniscient distance, I clung to Corbel's voice and followed wherever it led me. His monologue conveys not primarily the 'story,' which emerges of its own accord, but the dislocations, the rants and daydreams, the idiocies and inspirations, accruing as the social contract is frayed."—Thomas Frick

The Iron Boys

Literature & Fiction

Burning Books

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Books by Frick, Thomas