Kenny Schachter

NYC Debuts Two Paul Thek Exhibits and Rare Notebook Book

Two encyclopedic Paul Thek exhibits just opened in NYC, a veritable gift to the city, featuring a surfeit of masterful works on view that have never been seen before. There is a new publication coinciding with the occasion, the first volume of 100 facsimile reproductions of the grade school composition notebooks that Thek obsessively, fastidiously kept over the course of his life that remain—in their entirety—in the possession of the estate (administered by theater impresario Robert Wilson until his recent death). Thek explicitly intended the journals to be seen as art in and of themselves. I have curated two Thek solo shows over the past 35+ years, the first at Pace (2013) and the last at Thomas Dane (2025), both in London and numerous group exhibits; in addition, I wrote an essay on the newspaper pieces in the book Artist’s Artist (MIT Press). Rather than inundate with a plethora of images, here’s a lone painting incorporating, as many of Thek’s works did, some Duchampian wordplay. The composition of this image is redolent of the German artist Martin Kippenberger’s late nude self-portraits—Kippenberger eat your heart out. Actually, maybe that will be my next curatorial effort: the painted works of Thek and Kippenberger (and perhaps the fleshy art of Soutine too, whose wonderful new biography I just read). See both shows if you can. Image: Paul Thek, “Bread and Buttocks”, 1979-1980, oil on canvas, in artist’s frame with picture light, 11.0 in x 13.6 in x 1.6 in. The Pace catalogue from our earlier show has been reissued and is presently available at the gallery.