Untitled Sketchbook
A facsimile of the 1969 sketchbook in which Paul Thek drew himself over and over again, issued by American Art Catalogues in an edition of 1,000 — thirty-one pencil drawings, none of which had been shown publicly before this edition.
The original is a Dutch WIREO Schetsboek, oblong and wire-bound, and the facsimile reproduces it as an object rather than as a book about one: the same 9½ × 12½ inch leaf, the same spiral, the stationer's stamp still sitting in the corner of the cover, the whole thing housed flat in a grey board tray printed in red with the drawing's own credit line. What fills it is mostly self-portraiture, faces worked and reworked and probably drawn in a mirror. “No one has ever interested me quite as much as myself,” Thek once wrote. Nearby leaves carry a Christ in a crown of thorns and a run of strange still lifes: a crucifix laid beside an empty ashtray, a mushroom growing what looks like a corkscrew tail.
Thek (1933–1988) was among the first artists to work at the scale of a whole environment, and he spent much of the 1970s in Europe building theatrical installations with collaborators, nearly all of which were dispersed or destroyed. That loss is what gives the notebooks their weight: they are the most continuous surviving record of a practice otherwise known through photographs and reconstruction. He has since been the subject of exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sammlung Falckenberg and the ICA Philadelphia, and his estate is represented by Pace Gallery, Galerie Buchholz and Mai 36 Galerie.
