Pace Gallery, as one of the biggest in the world, will represent Paul Thek’s estate. Overall, this institution has a new deal in which it will also represent Galerie Buchholz, of Berlin and Cologne, and Mai 36, of Zurich. Thek is the enigmatic sculptor known for pieces that resembled amputated limbs enclosed in boxes. Alexander & Bonin previously represented the artist in question.
Pace Gallery Had Close Connection to Thek
The gallery will also collaborate directly with the Watermill Centre and Thek’s foundation. The Watermill Centre is the Long Island art centre that Robert Wilson, a theatre director and artist, owns and to which Thek left his inheritance. The CEO of the gallery said that the artist becamedeeply rooted in the company’s culture. Thek was close to Lucas Samaras and Peter Hujar, two Pace-represented artists.
Because of his connection to Pace’s artisans and Glimcher’s father, Pace founder Arne Glimcher, Marc said he genuinely knew Thek from a young age. Also, that he was capable to recollect interacting as a child with the artist. “Paul Thek is part of our Pace history, our legacy, our whole idea—everything we got brainwashed by our father to revere. Even though he was not on the Pace roster, he was in our minds, always”, he said.
Thek’s 1960s work is commonly accepted as an essential response to the era’s Minimalist approach. His sculptures from that era, which feature severed limbs and thighs, suggest changed physical states. Some saw them as a response to the violence that characterised that era, which was typified by the Vietnam War. He created little paintings about time passing and ephemerality in the last years of his career.
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Exhibition of Around 100 Artist’s Notebooks
Many people associate Thek with his Plexiglas container-based “Technological Reliquaries” series. The series include beeswax items that evoked slices of meat and human limbs. Pace aims to demonstrate that the artist created a far greater variety of work than most people are aware of, prior to his death in 1988 at the age of 54 from AIDS-related causes. (That goal mirrors the one of the Whitney Museum’s acclaimed 2010 Thek retrospective.)
Pace will host an exhibition featuring around 100 of the artist’s notebooks in 2025. Writings and sketches in watercolour as well as drawings can be found inside their pages. The gallery also plans to publish publications about these notebooks in conjunction with the exhibition.
“We have a long history with drawings”, Glimcher said. “We really believe, and have for many decades, that sketchbooks are a way in for understanding an artist. For him, it was a real mobile laboratory”.
