When Arnie Glimcher first walked into Paul Thek’s studio in 1965, he was taken aback by three meat sculptures on his work table. 'I knew they were wax but I could almost smell the meat,' the Pace Gallery founder tells Wallpaper*. Glimcher’s initial olfactory response to Thek’s category-defying work had eventually led to the artist’s second solo exhibition in his then-burgeoning career. Six decades later, the gallery presents its second solo show dedicated to Thek, who enjoyed one of the most singular artistic journeys of the 20th century.
An immediately beloved painter in New York’s swirling downtown during Warhol’s Factory era, he left it all behind for Italy in the late 1960s, and after a turbulent exhibition history on both sides of the ocean, which included participation in ‘Documenta V’ in 1972, he experienced neglect from the industry back in the US and worked as a bagger at an East Village grocery store before his AIDS-related passing in 1988.
Around 50 artworks in ‘Dream of Vanishing’ date back as far as 1962, with Thek’s lush ink on paper drawings, and crescendo with the ensuing years’ disarming meat sculptures made in wax as well as bodily materials such as human hair. Fleshy and immediate, they coincide with a period when a visit to Sicily’s Capuchin Catacombs with his lover, photographer Peter Hujar, reshuffled the artist’s ideas around life and transcendence.
Paul Thek, Untitled (75), 1964
Paul Thek Foundation director and The Watermill Center curator Noah Khoshbin, who has organised the show with Glimcher and Pace’s chief curator Oliver Shultz, underlines the painterly quality of the artist’s even most lifelike three-dimensional output. 'The decay he captured in meat had a direct connection to the 17th-century Dutch paintings,' he says. This idea of encapsulating momento mori in multidimensionality was an element of Thek’s playful curiosities beyond his work’s seemingly gruesome veneer.’
Khoshbin, who previously organised The Watermill Center’s 2021 Thek exhibition, ‘Interior/Landscape’, out of Robert Wilson’s personal collection, stresses the necessity of pursuing a 'constellation approach' to present a non-linear path. 'To honour the creative richness of an artist who felt he could be victimised by interpretation, we had to avoid a chronological timeline,' he adds.
Paul Thek, Untitled (Rising Heart), 1984
Enigmatic in their bearings yet expressive through an inquisitive technique, the works, some of which have never been previously exhibited, embody their time’s social tensions, sifted through their makers’ personal turmoils. In contrast to earlier paintings, in earthy hues and spectral finishes, sculptures such as Untitled (Feather Cross) from 1969 cement faith and its evanescence with a clutter of effervescent white feathers dressing a tall steel cross.
Mortality, in fact, anchors Thek’s constant tug of war between an immensely tactile channelling and a fascination for an ethereal punch. As manifested in the show’s title, a knife-edge march between an incredibly present embrace of life and the ever-imminent loss of it all renders the experience utterly carnal.
Installed in intimate vignettes under moody lighting, the show bows for its finale with late-career colour-busting zigzag-y acrylic paintings from the mid-1980s, just prior to Thek’s death at age 54. Casually called 'bad paintings', these small-scale abstractions, which often came with chairs scaled for children to sit in front of them, were reactionary to the industry’s brutal disinterest in his practice, all while his entire community was facing death and stigma due to the AIDS pandemic.
Paul Thek, Jesus in the Arms of Krishna, c.1979-1980
Both Khoshbin and Glimcher agree on the power of a quintet of scrolls, all kept in the late Robert Wilson’s collection and believed to be from 1973. Marked by erratic and subliminal hand gestures, the ink drawings, which stretch as long as 117 inches, meditate on the thought process of a mind that vehemently refused submission to the status quo. 'He made these drawings when all his peers were denying the hand and producing Pop Art,' says Glimcher, who sees the scrolls as 'the Rosetta Stone of his paintings.'
At a time of artificial intervention into all paths of creativity, Thek’s uncompromisingly raw ways of embodying emotionality speak at louder volumes.
‘Paul Thek: Dream of Vanishing’ is on through 14 August 2026