Paul Thek Artist's Artist

Paul Thek: Artist's Artist is a 550-page retrospective gathering more than 300 works by the American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988). Thek was largely passed over by the market and museums in his lifetime; he later became a touchstone for the artists who came after him.

The book was assembled for a 2009 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe that set Thek's work in dialogue with younger artists he had influenced. It reproduces paintings, sculpture, drawings, and installation work, along with photographs of the room-size environments Thek built with collaborators. Nineteen contributors, among them Kim Gordon, Mike Kelley, and Harald Szeemann, provide essays covering his career. Among the works discussed are the wax "Technological Reliquaries": casts resembling raw meat and human limbs, sealed in Plexiglas vitrines. They came years before other artists turned to the body as subject. Edited by Harald Falckenberg and Peter Weibel, the hardcover carries 300 color and 200 black-and-white illustrations.

Thek worked mainly between New York and Europe through the 1960s and 70s. He combined religious imagery, theatrical staging, and organic materials in ways that set him apart from the period's dominant movements. That mix of the sacred and the bodily, built through temporary installations rather than lasting objects, is what this volume traces.