The Rehearsal

Isabelle Albuquerque’s sculptures are the last thing she sees at night and her first sight in the morning. It has always been this way, yet until recently the artist made do with images on her phone. “Now, I get to sleep with my sculptures,” she says, surrounded by steel flowers in her new firehouse-turned-home-studio in Los Angeles’ Sierra Madre foothills. “I like them to be close by.” 

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In a fresh, impromptu buzz cut, bleached brows, leather pants, and a Tom of Finland T-shirt, the artist greets me out front. Above us, the surrounding mountain range is womb-like and alive. “She is my girlfriend,” Albuquerque says with a lilting laugh as she leads me into her airy space still sparse from her recent move. A mattress with a white duvet sits in the center. Around it, a Lilliputian prototype of the artist’s figure, a metal flower placed within a piece of gnarled wood, and a sunset-hued floral housewarming arrangement from her mother, in which a caterpillar has chosen to build a cocoon. A suite of wax feet line the windowsill, catching the afternoon glow that streams in through the floor-to-ceiling pane. In the corner is Albuquerque’s desk. 

The irony of where she now lives is not lost on the artist who lost her family home in 2018 to a fire in Malibu, and with it, everything to ash: Albuquerque and her sister’s entire life in flame, along with the life’s the work of their mother, the artist Lita Albuquerque. The tragic fire and what followed—life milestones including a stint training artificial intelligence on how to paint nudes, her sister’s first birth, and a book project for her mentor and collaborator Arthur Jafa with her partner Jon Ray—led Albuquerque to deviate from her ephemeral, performance-based practice and make something three-dimensional. The first? A bronze sculpture, made to withstand flames. Her own body, headless and resilient. By the next year, she was working on a series of forms that would go on to become her acclaimed series “Orgy For Ten People In One Body” that was first presented all together at Jeffrey Deitch in New York in 2022.

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Since then, Albuquerque has continued her examination of her complicated relationship with own body personified, objectified, and, finally, accepted. Albuquerque’s works often begin with a months-long rehearsal, in which the artist positions herself in front of a large dance mirror, taking photographs using a camera she shares with her mother. “I keep going until the movement becomes a metaphor,” she offers. Then her sister Jasmine Albuquerque, a choreographer, comes in to perfect the curl of a toe, the elongation of a pinky. Next, a scan, then a cast, then her form is compressed and concealed into a protective sculpture made of flock or wood or bronze or human hair. “The sculpture makes it so that you have to be strong for it. You have to rise to it,” she says of her practice. 

As she reflects on the past five years, Albuquerque reveals she is exploring what it might be like to include other forms, noting that she just presented wild flowers from a new series at Art Basel Paris and is preparing something new for her upcoming exhibition at the Bunker in December and another solo show at Nicodim in the spring. “I created a space for myself first, and now it's time to open it to play with other bodies in a way that feels outside of the system of how I usually interact,” she says. While sculpting her “Orgy” series, the artist spent time alone with deer in a nasturtium field near her house and in Griffith park. When she works at her beloved Walla Walla, Washington foundry, she stays on the facilities overnight, sometimes getting a sunburn from getting too close to the cauldron. 

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“It’s almost like method acting,” she explains. “Because I came from performance, the rehearsal is always a really big part of it. The final piece is almost an artifact of that process, of the becoming.” So what is she becoming now? Perhaps an interlocutor with the late artist Robert Therrien, who passed away from cancer at 71 years old in 2019. Albuquerque, the first artist to show work alongside the artist’s, channeled the artist’s gaze in preparation for the two-person survey, which runs at his meticulously preserved studio until December 14. “What I've mostly done at the estate is look at the boxes and boxes of his polaroids, learning how to see things from his perspective,” she says. Since then, she has felt a profound shift not only in her own practice, but also in how she views her studio as an extension of herself. 

We meet again, this time at Therrien’s expansive, two-story studio. The date lands on both Halloween and Albuquerque’s birthday. The building, built by Therrien—and stewarded by Dean Anes and Paul Cherwick—is a nondescript, dusty rose colored block of brick, next door to a dye factory on a quiet, industrial street in downtown Los Angeles. Albuquerque bursts in, beaming from an earlier surprise party. “​​I don't get to hear his secrets because he's not with us anymore, so I’m looking and thinking, How is this working? It's really magic,” she says enthusiastically, noting that while she was part of the first group of artists to tour the studio during the pandemic, she actually grew up with a green wooden arch wall sculpture by Therrien, who had also been in her mother’s art world circle. She pauses for a minute, racking her brain for an unearthed memory of him, “I can remember looking up at a very tall presence as a child.”

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Throughout the two levels, the two artists engage in a playful dance that punctures time and space. Her forms appear to have hoisted themselves atop, under, and besides his exacting and perception-distorting sculptures, mostly untitled. Beneath Therrien’s super-sized table built into the corner of the first floor sits the 10th work in “Orgy," made of wax, a black mane of human hair, and a wedding band, arms bound with rope. A mirror on the far wall beneath doubles her reflection, adding a new, uncanny element. 

Upstairs, Albuquerque’s “Orgy” figure #9, a bronze witch clutches a broomstick in ecstasy across the way from Therrien’s black, pointy wall piece, No title (black chapel), 2015. In the next room, the late artist’s towering stack of plates from 2009 looms at over seven feet tall. “Try walking around it,” Albuquerque urges me as she sits down on a nearby mattress to light a candle between the legs of “Orgy” #2. The plates appear to topple over to a dizzying effect as I make a loop.

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While Therrien’s fantastical larger-than-life sculptures of everyday objects from appliances to beards might, on the surface, appear much different than Albuquerque’s self-referential forms, upon closer look a shared investigation of surface, compression, documentation, and interior worlds reveals itself. Both artists’ work seem to posit: When you replicate something’s form, but change one element of it, what does that reveal about the object itself? What does it reveal about the intent to capture it?

As we continue past the gallery rooms and into the late artist’s living quarters, Albuquerque stops at a hanging soap-organizer. "The soap sculptures" she observes. “He would wash and wash them until it got to the perfect bar.” We pop into his starkly minimalist bedroom in which a tiny cross hangs over a twin bed against the wall. Albuquerque is fascinated with it. “It tells you so much about him,” she says. “A private devotion.” In Therrien’s kitchen, she points to his collection of books and a trap door that leads to stairs to another library. We linger by a stack of tiny pots and pans, then by a tiny flocked rabbit. “He always wanted to bring other artists in,” she says. “It’s a shame that he didn’t see it, but he did set it up.” It’s like he was leaving clues. “Yes, clues! I think those clues will continue to affect my work.” 

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We make our way back through the studio one last time, and I get the feeling that Albuquerque is absorbing every fibrous detail left behind by Therrien, from the massive wired beard to the glistening, mirrored droplets. “I think I'm a sculptor, not a painter because I don't really use my eyes, I use my hands,” she offers. When it's a dark room, you're still able to find your way through. “You can completely see, in a different way,” she agrees. “That's how we go through life, right? Blind and trying to feel our way through.”

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"Isabelle Albuquerque x Robert Therrien" is on view through December 14, 2024 at the Studio of Robert Therrien in Downtown Los Angeles, appointments and address available by request.