After nearly three decades of showing with Gagosian, the Robert Therrien estate has left the mega-gallery and joined the roster of David Zwirner, one of Gagosian’s competitors.
The move came shortly after an acclaimed survey of Therrien’s work closed at the Broad museum in Los Angeles. With 120 works included, the exhibition was billed as the biggest one to date for the sculptor, who died in 2019.
Therrien is most famous for his sculptures that raise domestic items to monumental proportions, most notably Under the Table (1994), his installation composed of a gigantic wood table and chairs that loom high over their viewers. He’s also well-known for his towering columns composed of oversized plates, which are held by institutions ranging from the Tate in London to Glenstone, the private museum of collectors Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales.
Often, Therrien did not give his works descriptive titles, preferring instead that his viewers invest his art with meaning. “He wanted people to make their own connections, find their own way in,” Paul Cherwick, Therrien’s longtime assistant, told ARTnews last year.
Gagosian held its first Therrien show in 1997 at its Beverly Hills gallery and went on to stage 10 more exhibitions of his work after that.
David Zwirner, the dealer behind his eponymous gallery, described himself as a “superfan” of Therrien, whose Los Angeles studio he once visited.
“There is an ethereal quality to Therrien’s artwork that is hard to pinpoint: his art is both recognizable and strange, concrete yet poetic, and its handmade quality is both quiet and affecting,” Zwirner said in a statement. “But most of all I was astounded by the work’s psychological complexity.”
It is rare, but not unheard of, for artists to jump between mega-galleries. The sculptor Carol Bove, the subject of a current Guggenheim Museum retrospective, left David Zwirner for Gagosian in 2023. Meanwhile, in 2021, Jeff Koons departed both Gagosian and David Zwirner to briefly join Pace Gallery, only to return to Gagosian last year.
