Robert Therrien, the artist behind Instagram’s giant chairs

Tables you could walk under, stacks of dishes as tall as columns, chairs that, seen from below, resemble towers. If these images feel familiar, chances are you’ve already gone down the rabbit hole—without even knowing it. And the artist behind that wonderland is Robert Therrien (1947–2019), the American sculptor who transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary, childhood into architecture, and the everyday into vertigo.

Paul Cherwick and Dean Anes, Robert Therrien Estate

Born in Chicago, Therrien first moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s to complete his MFA at the University of Southern California. It was there that he developed his personal language—introverted and poetic—far removed from the heroic canon of Minimalism. The turning point came a few years later, in 1984, when Therrien had his first major solo exhibition at the newly opened MOCA in Los Angeles. At the time, the city was emerging as a new hub for contemporary American art, with new museums opening and a dynamic art scene taking shape. This exhibition earned him significant visibility at a young age and led, by the 1980s and 1990s, to representation by two key figures in the art world: Leo Castelli in New York—legendary gallerist to Rauschenberg, Johns, and Lichtenstein—and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, a European pioneer of Conceptualism and Minimalism. Although he became part of the most prominent international circuits, Therrien maintained a withdrawn stance, pursuing a quiet, refined, and obsessive form of research focused on personal experience and domestic imagery.

In the early 1990s, Therrien’s practice underwent a dramatic shift: his quiet fixation on everyday objects fully took over. The works became larger, more physically immersive, more figurative and less allusive. He moved away from small, handmade sculptures toward monumental installations produced with industrial techniques. A shift that, while seemingly formal, was also deeply symbolic: "As my work becomes less abstract in appearance—the form is more clearly derived from common objects—it increasingly surrounds itself with abstractions, understood as associations and ideas to which it can refer," the artist explained. In contrast to Minimalism—which had long reduced form to geometric essentialism in pursuit of an impersonal, anti-expressive aesthetic—Therrien worked with domestic archetypes saturated with memory, lived experience, and a quiet melancholy. In Under the Table (1994), he constructs a giant table that radically shifts the viewer’s sense of scale. But this is more than a perceptual game: it is a deliberate physical evocation of childhood, capable of creating a double of reality—distorted and disorienting, near and far, familiar and alien all at once.

Ed Schad, curator of the exhibition Robert Therrien: This is a Story at The Broad, Los Angeles, from Nov. 22, 2025 to April 6, 2026

Far from Pop and the Duchampian ready-made in the strict sense, Therrien constructs a personal lexicon of archetypal objects, silences, expectations, sensory detours. As curator Lynn Zelevansky notes, hers "is an art of paradox, but also of balance. The perfect proportions, reproduced to scale, suggest the rationality of the operation, while the narrative associations tell of interiority and memory."

And indeed, even his simplest works, such as No Title (Snowman) (1982-98), a figure made of plaster snowballs just 91 cm tall, manage to evoke a lost time: childhood as an elusive memory, whose memory is always necessarily constructed a posteriori; sculpture as a means of resistance to the fading away of things.

Today Therrien is recognized as one of the most original and secluded voices in American post-minimalist sculpture. His works are part of such prestigious collections as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and MoMA in New York. In Italy, he is in the Panza di Biumo collection and, in 2016, some of his preparatory drawings were shown in the exhibition "Prototypology" at Gagosian in Rome. In 2006, his famous oversized chairs were used as a set design for the Marc Jacobs brand's 40th anniversary fashion show. A visual coincidence that recalls certain photomontages made by Therrien himself-unrelated to fashion but conceived as mock-ups for collectors-where editorial models wander among kitchens inhabited by giant crockery. In both cases, the gaze moves between everyday worlds and out-of-control proportions. Now even a major institution like The Broad chooses to pay tribute to his work. From November 22, 2025, to April 5, 2026, the Los Angeles museum will present Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest retrospective ever mounted on the artist. Featuring more than 120 works, many never before exhibited, the exhibition traces his entire career, restoring the influence he has had on generations of West Coast artists and designers. An opportunity to enter - once again - his silent and surreal universe, where the ordinary becomes threshold and every object becomes experience.