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Paul Thek
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.