NEW YORK, NY.- Follow the friendship and romance of storied artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, from the US to Italy and back again, through previously unpublished letters, postcards, candid portraits and contact sheets.

This volume shines a spotlight on the deep relationship between Paul Thek (1933–88) and Peter Hujar (1934–87) through the artists' letters and photographs. The book opens with Hujar's early portraits capturing the beginnings of their relationship, including Thek's first letters to Hujar, written while aboard a containership en route to Europe, where the two would eventually meet in Rome. From there, the publication traces their evolution into the icons we know them as today, with the remaining letters tracing Thek's travels and adventures, romantic dalliances, work and financial ups and downs through 1975.

Stay away from nothing reproduces more than 50 letters and postcards, along with drawings and other ephemera; their poetic, quotidian and melancholic tone provide a rare glimpse into Thek and Hujar's relationship as it wavers between seduction, glamour, tumult and mischievousness. Throughout this period, Hujar photographed Thek in his now iconic style, capturing him in Italy, in various studios and on the beaches of Fire Island. Included are the artist's now-classic images of Thek in the catacombs in Palermo, as well as his studio portraits of the artist creating The Tomb. Among these well-known works are dozens of other photographs and contact sheets, many unpublished until now, including candid portraits of Thek as well as images of the two artists goofing around or posing for passport photos. Collectively, these images demonstrate not only the complex emotional interiority of Thek but the tender, dark and hopeful connection between the two artists, lovers and friends.

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.

Peter Hujar (b. 1934, Trenton, New Jersey; d. 1987, New York) photographed his subjects with penetrating sensitivity and psychological depth. Unflinching and at times dark, he captured intellectuals, luminaries, and members of New York City subculture in moments of disarmed vulnerability. Hujar unabashedly embraced male sexuality and was unafraid to examine death and dying. In his introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, Susan Sontag wrote, '...meditate[d] and most-eyed friends and acquaintances stand, sit, slouch, mostly lie—not made to appear at their most forceful or most mortal.' Peter Hujar knew that portraits in life are always also, portraits in death.' Hujar was in the foreground of a group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers in downtown New York in the '70s and early '80s. In 1987, he died aged 53 from AIDS-related pneumonia, leaving behind a complex and profound body of work that has become posthumously celebrated.


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