Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien on View in the late Therrien’s Art Space in Downtown LA is a Powerful Dialogue Between Intergenerational Artists

Installation view of "Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien" at the Robert Therrien Art Space, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo by Joshua White; Courtesy of Isabelle Albuquerque and Robert Therrien Estate.

By LITA BARRIE December 16, 2024

It is rare to see an exhibition that is so exquisitely calibrated that it has become the talk of the town. The late Therrien (1947-2019) designed his two floor art space 35 years ago as an extension of his devotion to making, living and breathing art. Using Shaker style  architectural design (stars without banisters, drops in floor, clean lines, overall simplicity, utility and craftsmanship) along with vintage Deco tile, kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures, Therrien  created a wondrous space to display his larger-than-life sculptures: outsized folding chairs, plates, wobbly stacks of pots and pans.The space has surprises like open closets, nooks and crannies filled with gigantic sculptures that make the viewer feel like Alice in Wonderland and bring back memories of being a little child peering up at an adult -size world.. It has always functioned as a place where art devotees could sit at his kitchen table and discuss art but now it is open for a public art dialogue for the first time.

The exhibition is the inauguration of an ongoing series of collaborations at the art space. It recalls Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s house and even Casa Luis Barragan house (which is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list) in Mexico City. Europe also has great artists’ living studios that are open to the public but Therrien’s space is the first one of this kind to open in the ever-expanding, LA art megalopolis.

Isabelle Albuquerque is the perfect artist to begin the series of collaborations because she has taken off like a shooting star since she began making sculptures in 2016 after the first election of Donald Trump. She then cleared a space in her office and began sculpting heads and phalluses out of plaster and clay that she sequentially beheaded for a few years. Albuquerque was already known for performance art and she also has a background in music and architecture. She continues to work with her own body because she views it as a performative medium. Using life casting and 3D scans she transmutates her body into post human partial-animals with hooves, claws and tails and uses sensuous fur and hair - her own hair and ceremonial hair from Indian rituals - to give them an erotic, feral, feminine power.

Albuquerque told me she relocates “ the emanation of desire around the female form”. She creates women as subjects with their own internal desire rather than as objects of external masculine desire. Her work goes beyond the1980s feminist critique of the male gaze by feminist film theorists like Laura Mulvey because she uses the tactile qualities of sculptural materials to evoke erotic and emotional intimacy. This is in the genre of parler - femme ( talk-woman) theorized by 1970s French poststructural feminists ( especially Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva ) who often reference severed heads and decapitation as a metaphor for silencing women into submission.

Installation view of "Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien" at the Robert Therrien Art Space, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo by Joshua White; Courtesy of Isabelle Albuquerque and Robert Therrien Estate.

But Albuquerque comes from an internal lineage which is an extension of matriarchal mythology, combining art historical references to early pre-feminists including Artemisia Gentileschi the 17th century baroque painter and early 20th century feminist artist Louise Bourgeois. Today, Albuquerque's work has parallels to her close friend Louise Bonnet’s paintings of headless female figures. Her radical work is also part of the Posthuman avant garde which uses technology to blur binary boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans. Her life-size bronze sculpture Fall of Man ( 2024) is currently on view at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles’ updated and expanded version of the ground breaking 1992 Post Human exhibition. This prophetic exhibition has become a manifesto that predicted the way biotechnology, science and computerization would re-shape the human form and cause sociological shifts that would profoundly change art and culture - even continuing after the pandemic. Posthumanism has become the theme of many high-end gallery and museum art exhibitions, philosophical books and even popular movies. 

In 2018, Lita Albuquerque - her legendary artist mother - lost her house and studios in Malibu Canyons in the Woolsey Fire which burned 96,949 acres and destroyed 1,643 structures. This wildfire destroyed all the memorabilia and art objects made and collected by her mother (interdisciplinary environmental artist), grand-mother (erotic writer) great grandmother (artist in Tunisia) and sister (dancer and choreographer). This loss of four female generations’ beloved objects,  awakened Albuquerque’s understanding of the mnemonic significance of objects that carry memories and associations of time, place and lives.

She turned to using bronze then plaster, wood, rubber, flocking, resin, patinated bronze, beeswax, hair and animal fur.  Most of the female nudes in this phenomenal exhibition are from her series Orgy for Ten People in One Body which she started during the pandemic in 2019 which she told me created “ touch hunger” because we were all so isolated. She found that working with hair and fur was healing through touch, much  like trauma therapy that resets the immune system by removing negative energy in the body ( like petting a purring cat). This made her feel particularly connected to cats - which led to making feline figures that recall Bastet, the Egyptian goddess of healing.

Installation view of "Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien" at the Robert Therrien Art Space, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo by Joshua White; Courtesy of Isabelle Albuquerque and Robert Therrien Estate.

The two artists’ work are paired to develop further readings. Her animal figures are often installed, crouched or on-all- fours on vintage Gunlocke tables and banged up vintage workbenches. In some works they recall deity figures for worship, in another work the installation of a crouched figure recalls Christina, in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World - who was a real life heroine because despite her severe disability she struggled to crawl along.

By marrying her animal figures with Therrien’s artifacts they become more alive, impacting each other’s meaning and creating further readings. Both artists share a delightful sense of humor because they relish the preposterous - recalling Marcel Duchamp. The most humorous installation pairs a female figure riding a broom . Albuquerque told me that during the witch hunt period women used to insert an ointment inside themselves that created a sensation of flying high. She references this history in a darkly erotic sculpture of a wax female figure with legs wide open, inserting a burning white candle inside herself that drips wax on the floor. This piece was made after watching her sister’s fifty hour child birth. Another figure made of delectable buttery beeswax has real pubic hair which is never seen in art - or even porn magazines since it went out of fashion in the 1980s when women started to shave or laser it off. Female pubic hair is obviously a loaded topic which is a sign of the times and she uses her own head hair to personalize it.

Several more recent sculptures from her Meadows series ( which will be exhibited next year at Nicodim Gallery, New York) have leaves or wild flowers sprouting from their hands. The wild flowers reference Georgia O’Keefe’s vaginal flowers. The leaves symbolize the human connection to trees.

Installation view of "Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien" at the Robert Therrien Art Space, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo by Joshua White; Courtesy of Isabelle Albuquerque and Robert Therrien Estate.

The most noteworthy feature of Albuquerque’s female sculptures is that their body language is  so self-possessed, self-controlled and in-command of their own authentic lives. In this respect Albuquerque’s  use of the feminine pose reminds me of Alison Saar’s defiant warrior goddesses. In very different ways these artists explore a female self-empowerment which is galactic power because it has strong connections to nature and the cosmos. Whereas male power is external power over others, female power is internal power over self. This makes their work culturally significant as powerful new feminist symbols - especially in today’s war on women.        

Unlike Albuquerque, Therrien achieved recognition late in life but that is an inter-generational difference because he always had the respect of his peers when LA was a regional art center. Albuquerque even recalls a Therrien piece her mother owned. But it is the aesthetic similarities between the two artists who both love to explore materialism and scale that opens new readings of their work in conversation together and with the Shaker interior design. The installation by the artist working alongside Dean Anes and Paul Cherwick, who manage the estate, is one of the most exquisite exhibition designs I have seen anywhere in the world. WM

Presented by Robert Therrien Estate with Isabelle Albuquerque in collaboration with Nicodim Gallery.