Paul Thek : What the Tortoise Taught Us

This study of the American-born cult artist Paul Thek presents works from 1963 to 1988 alongside essays, documentary images and a narrative biography. After confronting Conceptualism and Minimalism in his New York work of the 1960s, Thek pioneered large-scale spatial installation in Europe in the 1970s. Deeply distrustful of and even repulsed by the entrenched hierarchies and orthodoxies of the international art world and ambivalent about his own position within it, he made artworks that were at once deeply ironic, biting and achingly sad. For example, his best known piece, "The Tomb," which was installed at New York's Stable Gallery in 1967, was a cast of Thek's own body laid down on the floor in a posture of death, indicating the demise of the bohemian artist. In later, more spatially oriented works, he attempted to remove any trace of himself as the author. Thek died of AIDS in 1988, leaving behind a complex artistic legacy.