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Indepth Arts News:
"THE RECENT WORK OF ROBERT THERRIEN"
2000-07-17 until 2000-09-10
SITE Santa Fe
Santa Fe, NM,
USA United States of America
At the age of 50, Robert Therrien is one of the
most highly respected artists working in Southern
California. Over the last 25 years, he has
produced a unique body of work in which forms and images that recur in his sculpture
have been recycled and reinterpreted with the aid of painting, drawing and photography.
Therrien is known predominantly as a sculptor and this exhibition will present eight
major sculptures, most done within the last five years. It will also include a group of
smaller reliefs and two-dimensional works in a variety of media that will help to
explicate Therrien's very personal and unusual creative process.
We are very pleased to be able to bring this exhibition to New Mexico, said Louis
Grachos, SITE Santa Fe's director & curator. We think it is going to be an important
summer exhibition for us especially because after is leaves us, the exhibition will
travel to only one other US museum, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, and
then it goes to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico.
Therrien's is an art of paradox and balance. 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 symbols - a bird on the wing; a
snowman that turned on its side becomes a cloud - rigorous formalism coexisting with
overt sentiment. Therrien's sculptures suggest rationality and objectivity in the
perfection of their proportions, and their narrative associations denote interiority and
personal history. In recent years, Therrien's sculpture has increased in size, and
more often it is freestanding. Its representational aspects have become more dominant
and it has generally gotten bolder. Installed, these newer works are environmental
pieces. They activate the space around them, which becomes as important to the
artist1s statement as the sculpture itself. Entering one of Therrien's fully realized
installations is like walking into one of his paintings in which a single object is isolated
on an uninflected ground.
SITE Santa Fe is located at 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM. New extended
exhibition hours during the Biennial are: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.,
Friday 10 a.m. - 7 p.m. Admission is $5.00 for adults and $2.50 for students and
seniors. Friday is the free admission day at SITE Santa Fe, and this is made possible
by a grant from the Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston, Texas. Docent tours are offered on
Fridays at 6 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tours in Spanish are by
appointment. SITE Santa Fe gift certificates are available. Call 505.989.1199 for more
information.
IMAGE:
Robert Therrien
Under the Table, 1994
Santa Fe Depot, San Diego
Photo Credit: Phillip Scholz Rittermann
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