Archives

Paul Thek

09.23.11 - 10.16.11
Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Paul Thek
Big Bang Painting, 1987-1988
Collection Philippe Piessens, London

Photo: Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse

 

Paul Thek

Le grand chinois, 1971

Collection Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne/ Centre de création industrielle

Photo : Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse
 

Paul Thek
Untitled (ribbon) circa, 1988
Courtesy of Kenny Schachter, London

 

 

Paul Thek

Untitled (South America), 1984

Courtesy of Kenny Schachter, London

Photo: DR

Paul Thek

Untitled, 1971

Courtesy Kenny Schachter, London

 

Born in 1933 in the United States, he died in 1988.

 

Paul Thek is one of the tutelary figures of this edition. Fascinated by metaphysics and the history of religions and their concrete impact on societies and on the world, in a period, the 1960s, when America was dedicating itself to production, mass culture and self-glorification, Thek, a man of insatiable spiritual yearnings, opposed the seriality championed by Pop Art, which he associated with Neoliberalism. His emblematic works include the Technological Reliquaries (pieces of meat made of wax placed in Plexiglas funeral urns) and The Tomb – Death of a Hippie, in which a cast of his own body conveys the importance of the body and flesh in his work, which he used to inspire the kind of emotion that, in his view, was absent from Minimalism and Pop Art.

 

A selection of his paintings is being shown at les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie Toulouse.