ROME.- The Nicola Del Roscio Foundation presents, from Friday 28th October 2022 a Saturday 28th January 2023, a new exhibition project dedicated to one a key figure of contemporary art history: Paul Thek (New York, US 1933-1988).

“Paul Thek. Italian Hours”, curated by Peter Benson Miller, is a collaboration with the Watermill Center, Alexander and Bonin, New York, and the Estate of George Paul Thek.

A host of recent scholarship has shed new light on Paul Thek’s complex and enduring relationship to Italy and its fundamental impact on his innovative, genre-defying work in a variety of media.

Indebted to these accounts, “Paul Thek. Italian Hours”, the first of its kind in Italy since 1995, reunites a selection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures – including vestiges of his seminal, now lost work The Tomb – marked by his experiences in Rome, Sicily and the island of Ponza.

Returning to Italy repeatedly between 1962 and 1975, Thek responded to archaeological sites, burial practices, religious processions, as well as characteristic elements of the Italian landscape, in what amounts to a baroque response to Pop Art and Minimalism and their predilection for dispassionate industrial production.

His work also evidences meaningful dialogue with a community of other contemporary artists working in Italy, including Cy Twombly and Piero Manzoni. These cosmopolitan connections, encouraged by Thek’s relationship with arts patron and gallerist Topazia Alliata, are often overlooked in attempts to fit Thek into an exclusively American postwar trajectory. Demonstrating Thek’s versatility as an artist, and his enduring legacy, this exhibition explores the role of Italy as a catalyst in various key moments in his career.

Paul Thek (1933-1988) was a sculptor, painter, and multimedia artist.

Paul Thek’s artistic practice ranged from the hermetic to the spectacular. Working collaboratively, Thek constructed expansive and surreal environmental installations, collectively reimagining museums as sites of transformation, and the life of exhibitions as cycles of birth, maturation, death, and renewal. In solitude, he cast elements of his body, figments of nature, or wax renderings of raw meat, and sealed them within plexiglass vaults which he called “technological reliquaries”. He created exuberant abstractions on newspaper and canvas, as well as sensitively rendered landscapes; the sublime within nature.

During his lifetime, Paul Thek was a frequent collaborator to Robert Wilson, a close companion to the photographer Peter Hujar, and to author Susan Sontag who dedicated her seminal volume of essays “Against Interpretation” to him. He created installations for the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Documenta V, Kassel, curated by Harald Szeeman. Thek died of AIDS in 1988.

In 2010-2011, a posthumous retrospective, DIVER, was exhibited at The Whitney Museum, New York, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. A selection of his work is on permanent display at The Watermill Center.