Robert Therrien

This survey of recent artwork by Robert Therrien, one of California's most accomplished and respected artists, examines the fertile contradictions at the heart of his endeavor. In the simplicity of their forms and the refinement of their proportions, his works are suffused with a cool objectivity. Evoking emblematic objects such as snowmen, birds, Dutch doors, clouds, plates, beards, and brushes, they have a childlike familiarity, yet their often huge size and generic rendering give them an uncanny, unsettling quality. Included in this volume are a comprehensive essay by curator Lynn Zelevansky examining the development and import of Therrien's oeuvre, a consideration by Thomas Frick of the paradoxical nature of his work in relation to abstraction and formalism, and art historian Norman Bryson's account of Therrien's art in the light of animated cartoons. This book is by far the most comprehensive publication to date on the unique work of this important contemporary artist.