Paul Thek: Selected Drawings 1966 - 1988

Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by Paul Thek (1933-1988) from February 4 through March 13, 1999.

The exhibition will present a selection of drawings from the years 1966 - 1988 and will include both well known and less familiar images. Nearly all of the works are being shown in New York for the first time. Thek's drawings on newspaper from the mid-1970s are his most widely known works on paper, several of which will be included in the exhibition along with examples of his last works characterized by phrases scratched into loosely painted acrylic on newspaper. Several less familiar drawings (mostly from the early 1970s) are of a more personal nature -- self-portraits, surprisingly exquisite landscape drawings of Thek's beloved Ponza, and the often whimsical drawings he made in notebooks. 

Paul Thek was born in Brooklyn in 1933. He studied at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute in the early 1950's and was primarily a painter until the mid-1960's when 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 1960's and 1970's 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 60's sculptures and a group of bronzes made in Rome in the mid-1970's 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). Most recently his work was shown in the ICA, Philadelphia's 35th Anniversary show and a one-person exhibition at the Arts Club, Chicago (catalogue available). 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.