The American artist Robert Therrien came to prominence in the early 1980s for making objects with simple, recognizable shapes such as pitchers, coffins and doors, all explored through a variety of materials including copper, wood and bronze. The artist began playing with scale in the 1990s, and this has remained a key means by which he defamiliarises everyday objects, endowing them with a fresh and astonishing power. His appropriation of domestic items for the purposes of artistic composition recalls the classical still-life, but his use of proportion, material and space connects his work to architecture.

This major exhibition, entitled Robert Therrien: Smoke Signals, featured the signature installation No Title (Table and Four Chairs) in Tate Liverpool's Wolfson Room, as well as other large scale sculptures and a selection of Therrien’s surprisingly intimate works on paper.

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