Nothing But Time: Paul Thek Revisited 1964–1987

A slim staple-bound catalogue that compresses Paul Thek's entire working life into 72 pages, made for the 2013 Pace London exhibition that carried his posthumous reappraisal out of the museum and into the gallery.

Curated by Kenny Schachter, Nothing But Time: Paul Thek Revisited 1964–1987 gathered a focused selection across every medium Thek worked in — the early paintings made on newspaper, the wax-and-Plexiglas Technological Reliquaries, and the late watercolors painted in the years before his death in 1988 — with an introduction by Schachter. Thirty color and two black-and-white plates run across an oblong 8½ × 9½ inch page. The object itself is deliberately modest: flecked grey board, blue type, three staples through the spine, no jacket and no scholarly apparatus, closer to a gallery handout than to a monograph.

Thek (1933–1988) was among the most influential and least commercial figures of his New York generation, known for the Technological Reliquaries, the effigy The Tomb, and the large collaborative environments he built across Europe through the 1970s, most of which were dispersed or destroyed. His reputation was rebuilt almost entirely after his death from an AIDS-related illness, above all by the Whitney's 2010 retrospective Diver; this catalogue belongs to the wave of gallery exhibitions that followed it. Long out of print.