Paul Thek at ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art

Paul Thek (1933–1988) is considered an artist with cult status. The hitherto most comprehensive retrospective of his oeuvre focused on the phenomenal effect of his work on contemporary art and established Thek's historical significance, from legendary outsider to the founder and center of an art movement. It has been possible to bring together more than 300 of Thek’s works, which are largely in private ownership and therefore only seldom publicly shown.

In their anti-heroic diversity and multimediality, and with their references to art, literature, and religion, his works (painting, photography, video, sculpture, and extensive environments) are among the central sources for the revolt and eruption of art in the 1960s. It is mainly for this reason that one of the early theoretical masterpieces of this epoch, Susan Sontag's »Against Interpretation« (1962), was dedicated to him. The mold castings, also those of his own body parts, wax replicas of human tissue, hair, teeth, and bones in Plexiglas cases, which he produced between 1964 and 1967 as »Technological Reliquaries,« in their mixture of desire and repulsion, decay and pathos, held up the truth of the body to the world of commodities and the transfiguration of the everyday, as well as the idealization and dramatization of corporative minimal art. With this, Thek influenced not only contemporaries such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, but also present-day artists. His obsessive, often mystical content, which made him the founder of Abject Art and Environments, or Ensembles, was presented in a formal way that opened the path for the mixture of studio situation and total spatial design, of private and general icons, of profane and religious objects, of everyday and myth, of damaged objects to fragmentary piles of found materials, as was continued by artists from Anna Oppermann through to Thomas Hirschhorn.

More.