Robert Therrien’s Lens

At Gagosian’s Chelsea gallery in Manhattan, three rooms house Robert Therrien’s latest studies of perception. His sculptures manipulate everyday objects and compel viewers to quickly adjust perspectives as they make their way around the pieces. In the front room, the tapering of a brass flagpole renders a common object strange through a forced perspective, and next door, a glass house is jam-packed with transparent materials such as bubble-wrap rolls and clear plastic hangers. “We are forced to change locations and understand that this is another way of looking at objects,” says Ealan Wingate, the gallery’s director. Therrien’s work focuses on simple psychological questions: how do objects exist in the world and how can they be abstracted? For the past 30 years, the American artist has been creating pieces that incite new interpretations. “There’s a sense of transfiguration,” Wingate says. “What we expect is completely subverted by what we get, and what we get is completely subverted by what we know in the real world.” The exhibition closes tomorrow but it is certainly worth a last-minute, or second, visit.