One of the year's best museum solo shows is at Broad

'Robert Therrien: This Is a Story' goes big (very big) with plates, tables and more.

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"NO TITLE (red chapel relief)," 1991, enamel on paper and wood, by Robert Therrien, at the Broad.

A giant stack of dishes from the kitchen, a disembodied array of Daffy-like duckbills, an angry storm cloud of old rotary dial telephones embedded in tangled cords - Robert Therrien's art covers a lot of varied territory.

Whether he was making a 3D sculpture to stand on the floor, a 2D painting to hang on the wall, or a 3D sculpture attached to a wall like an ancient frieze, he managed the same uncanny result - objects where the purely visual and the utterly physical demand equal time.

At the Broad, "Robert Therrien: This Is a Story" concludes 2025 with one of the year's best museum solo shows. A smashing retrospective of a seemingly sui generis artist - Therrien died at 71 in 2019 - he takes a prominent place among a number of distinctive painters and sculptors since the 1960s and 1970s in L.A. who don't seem to fit comfortably within larger categories. Two of them Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha - have contributed concise reflections on Therrien's work to the lovely, insightful catalog that accompanies the show.

These days, art emphasizing subject matter often shunts form to the side, as if the visual analysis that form demands is irrelevant. With Therrien, it's essential. Students at L.A.'s numerous celebrated art schools would benefit from spending time in the exhibition.

This art's simultaneous appeal to the eye and the hand, formally lean and visually uncluttered, yields a strangely conceptual punch. A sense of charismatic presence-the material manifestation of an abstract idea - is inescapable.

Start with "No title (red chapel relief)" from 1991.

The simple contour of a chapel, its steeple slightly off-center, stands out from the wall about 6 inches deep. The simplified shape is the kind you might see on a Christmas card or a stamp.