Whitney Museum of American Art, New York October 21 - January 9, 2011
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh February 5 - May 1, 2011
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles May 22 - September 4, 2011
Paul Thek was born in Brooklyn in 1933. He studied at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute in the early 1950s. In the mid-1960s, he produced a well-known body of work, The Technological Reliquaries: wax sculptures which looked like raw meat or human limbs and were encased in plexiglas vitrines. Large-scale, full-body casts followed, sometimes set into specific environments. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Thek spent much of his time in Europe making room-size installations constructed from transitory materials such as sand, newspaper and trees. Aside from the wax sculptures of the 60s and a group of bronzes made in Rome in the mid-1970s, Thek's existing artworks are paintings and drawings.
There have been two retrospectives of his work -- ICA, Philadelphia, 1977 and Witte de With, Rotterdam, 1995 (traveled). Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky are currently researching a retrospective to be presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010-2011. Thek’s work is included in numerous American and European museum collections with particularly strong representation of his drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Estate of Paul Thek is represented by Alexander and Bonin .
image: Paul Thek, Untitled, 1966. Wax, plexiglass, Formica and melamine laminate, and rhodium-plated bronze, 14 × 15 1/16 × 7 1/2 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective, 1963-1988
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
October 21 - January 9, 2011
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
February 5 - May 1, 2011
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
May 22 - September 4, 2011
Paul Thek was born in Brooklyn in 1933. He studied at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute in the early 1950s. In the mid-1960s, he produced a well-known body of work, The Technological Reliquaries: wax sculptures which looked like raw meat or human limbs and were encased in plexiglas vitrines. Large-scale, full-body casts followed, sometimes set into specific environments. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Thek spent much of his time in Europe making room-size installations constructed from transitory materials such as sand, newspaper and trees. Aside from the wax sculptures of the 60s and a group of bronzes made in Rome in the mid-1970s, Thek's existing artworks are paintings and drawings.
There have been two retrospectives of his work -- ICA, Philadelphia, 1977 and Witte de With, Rotterdam, 1995 (traveled). Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky are currently researching a retrospective to be presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010-2011. Thek’s work is included in numerous American and European museum collections with particularly strong representation of his drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Estate of Paul Thek is represented by Alexander and Bonin .
image: Paul Thek, Untitled, 1966. Wax, plexiglass, Formica and melamine laminate, and rhodium-plated bronze, 14 × 15 1/16 × 7 1/2 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York