Isabelle Albuquerque
Robert Therrien Estate is opening its Los Angeles studio doors to the public for the first time for a collaborative exhibition with native Los Angelean sculptor Isabelle Albuquerque. This is the inaugural exhibition in an ongoing series presenting noteworthy voices in dialogue with Robert Therrien’s in the late artist’s longtime studio.
Therrien worked as he lived (and often lived where he worked) in his self-designed and self-constructed downtown compound amongst his elephantine and miniature stacks of plates, oil cans, witch’s hats, and Brancusi beards. After a day’s labor, he’d frequently sleep in a twin bed situated beneath one of his cloud pieces, his real-life slumber illustrated by a dream within a dream that he already manifested. The studio was an extension of the artist himself, and has remained very much alive with his spirit since he passed in 2019.
Albuquerque quite literally grew up in the shadow of Therrien—her mother had one of his wooden arch wall sculptures hanging in their home. While Therrien’s practice toys with familiar forms made unfamiliar through scale and context, Albuquerque multiplies her own body and melds it with structures organic, alien, and spiritual. Like Therrien, Albuquerque’s studio practice is inseparable from the artist’s many selves; she sleeps with her sculptures prior to exhibitions, and often weaves her own hair, nails, and tears into them.
Although the two artists occupy separate generational and existen- tial planes, when presented together within Therrien’s labyrinthian studio space, their work develops a conversational rapport that leaps in unexpected tangents and blossoms into a Green World wherein interior life meets exterior, the inanimate is personified, and the domestic becomes divine.
Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien is presented by Robert Therrien Estate in collaboration with Nicodim with support from Jeffrey Deitch.
Isabelle Albuquerque’s formally powerful and psychologically charged sculpture invites multiple, simultaneous readings and perspectives. With a background in performance, Albuquerque uses her own body to investigate the multivalent nature of identity and to create a cross-temporal conversation that centers the experiences of women and their own connection to desire, sexuality and embodiment. In Orgy for Ten People in One Body, a recently completed body of work, Albuquerque marries ancient and contemporary technologies such as 3D scanning and robotic carving across multiple materials, each with their own agency and complex history, where the very idea of the human and the limits of the body are being confronted with unprecedented metamorphosis. She will present works from that series alongside new works from Alien Spring, a new series which will be presented in total at Nicodim New York in May 2025.
Albuquerque (b. 1981) studied architecture and theater at Barnard College and lives and works in her native Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Post Human, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2024); DISEMBODIED, curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2024); MATERNITY LEAVE: NONE OF WOMEN BORN, Nicodim in collaboration with the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2023); Orgy for Ten People in One Body, Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2022, solo); BodyLand, curated by Lauren Taschen, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2022); Skin in the Game, curated by Zoe Lukov, Chicago (2022) and Miami (2021); The Emerald Tablet, curated by Ariana Papademetropolous, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2021); Nuestrxs Putxs, Human Resources, Los Angeles (2021); and Sextet, Nicodim, Los Ange- les (2020, solo). Albuquerque’s work has appeared in numerous publi- cations including The New York Times, Artforum, L’officiel, and Flash Art. Last year she released Orgy for Ten People in One Body (Jeffrey Deitch, Nicodim, Pacific, 2023), a 450 page monograph about the series that includes conversations with the artists Miranda July and Arthur Jafa.
Robert Therrien (1947–2019) was born in Chicago and studied art at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and at USC in Los Angeles. Therrien’s work created an extensive lexicon of numerous forms and motifs based on his memories, creating imagery that was both familiar and aloof. His vast body of work explores and reworks numerous immediately identifiable forms in a serial manner. He would often revisit and modify these structures in various media, including drawings, sculpture, photography, painting. His carefully wrought imagery encompassed everything from miniature works on paper to large scale architectural sculptural installations, of which he made a series as some of his final works.
Therrien graduated from the University of Southern California, and remained in Los Angeles for the next forty-five years, living and working in a vast studio which he designed himself.
Major exhibitions of Therrien’s works have been held at Gana Art Center, Seoul (2022); Tate Modern, London (2018); The Contemporary Austin (2015); The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2013); Milwaukee Art Museum (2010); The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edin- burgh (2010); Kunstmuseum Basel (2008); Public Art Fund, New York (2005); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2001); and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1991).
His work is collected by The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Hir- shorn, Washington DC; The Tate Modern, London; Kunstmuseum Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York; and many others.
Excitingly, the artist’s studio and estate has opened its doors to the public and invited a contemporary artist, Isabelle Albuquerque, to install her work across the multi-room studio building — the two artists’ work intermingling in conversation. Both have developed a cohesive and honed iconography — while Therrien’s work frequents pots, pans, raindrops, clouds, oil cans, and steeples, Albuquerque’s work centers on a sensual femme human form.
Isabelle Albuquerque is expanding, making room for flowers and other forms to grow from her self-referential practice. For her current two-person show with the late artist Robert Therrien’s estate, her sculptures become charged with a new energy.