Pace Gallery brings legendary 'artist's artist' Paul Thek back to New York after 16 years

NEW YORK, NY.— Pace presents Dream of Vanishing, an exhibition of more than fifty works of painting, sculpture, and drawing by Paul Thek, one of the most mysterious, provocative, and quietly influential figures in the history of post-1960s art. On view at 540 West 25th Street from May 15 through August 14, the exhibition centers on a suite of never-before-seen works by Thek, presented to the public for the first time in dialogue with some of the artist’s most celebrated and best-known works.

Curated by Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher and Noah Khoshbin, director of the Paul Thek Foundation and curator of The Watermill Center, with Oliver Shultz, Chief Curator at Pace, the exhibition runs in parallel with a solo presentation of Thek’s work at Galerie Buchholz in New York. Organized in close collaboration with the Paul Thek Foundation and The Watermill Center, Dream of Vanishing precedes The Watermill Center’s upcoming exhibition The Disappearance of Landscape: Oakleyville, 1964–2022 (August 29, 2026 –March 20, 2027), investigating the practices of a group of artists in Paul Thek’s circle who lived and worked between New York City and the sparsely populated Fire Island community of Oakleyville from the mid-1960s to present day.

Pace’s exhibition marks the first major presentation in New York to survey a wide breadth of Thek’s work since the 2010 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show takes its title from a line in one of the artist’s notebooks, in which he jotted down the words “dream of vanishing.” The phrase suggests both reverie and provocation and underscores Thek’s lifelong preoccupation with disappearance, erasure, and the ephemeral, which was reflected in his materials and methods. It also suggests an admonition: to actively dream of vanishing as a way of meditating on time, desire, and the body—ideas that cut to the heart of Thek’s idiosyncratic yet deeply philosophical engagement with the tragedies and ecstasies of life. Compendia of his correspondences, watercolors, diary entries, poetry, and more, a group of Thek’s notebooks—which he considered to be artworks unto themselves—will be included in Dream of Vanishing. A new facsimile edition by Pace Publishing of Thek’s Notebook #41 from 1977 will also be released to coincide with the exhibition.

As much myth as historical figure, Thek has often been called the quintessential “artist’s artist.” By the time of his death in 1988, he had attained the status of legend among other artists but has long been absent from art history textbooks and unknown to the wider public. Deeply fugitive, Thek’s periods of willful concealment—such as his abrupt disappearance from the New York art world in 1967, followed by nearly a decade of residing primarily on the small and remote Italian island of Ponza—were always followed by moments of re-emergence in the New York art world, though with increasing degrees of obscurity. In many ways, his efforts at self-erasure reflect his unique philosophy of artmaking, imagining his work not as fixed historical object in time but as a body capable of rebirth, disappearing and reappearing again in some later moment with renewed meaning.

Despite this fugitivity, Thek’s work haunts the imagination of successive generations of artists. He remains infamous today for his Technological Reliquaries, the so-called “meat pieces” made between 1964 and 1967, several of which will feature at the center of Pace’s presentation. Mixing Catholic religiosity with posthuman technological critique, Thek produced these shockingly lifelike representations of human flesh by carefully sculpting and painting wax. He sectioned his ersatz meat into grotesquely geometric sections and encased it inside transparent vitrines, offering acerbic commentary on the aesthetics of Minimalism and Pop.

While Thek remains best known for his meat pieces, he always defined himself first and foremost as a painter. Dream of Vanishing foregrounds Thek’s painting practice, examining the full arc of his mature work from canvases he made in Italy in the early 1960s to the “picture light” series of the 1970s and the small, colorful “bad paintings” he produced during the 1980s. These paintings provide a powerful and important context for Thek’s better-known sculptural practice. The exhibition also includes several deeply elegiac works from the final two years of the artist’s life, a period in which he deals directly with questions of mortality and transience in the face of his AIDS diagnosis.

Among the exhibition’s key revelations is a suite of large-scale “scrolls,” works on paper that Thek produced in the 1970s and later gifted to his friend and collaborator Robert Wilson, an artist and dramaturg who became the executor of Thek’s estate. These five scrolls, previously unseen, each measure ten feet in length. Unlike anything previously known in Thek’s oeuvre, they testify to the artist’s virtuosic powers of draftsmanship as well as his lyrical approach to mark-making. Entirely abstract, they evoke landscape with fields of black watercolor and ink that become coruscating currents, suggesting the movement of the tides or wind sweeping across expansive planes of grass. Thek’s scrolls are inventories of marks, rhyming with abstractions he explored in works made in Italy a decade earlier, several of which are also included in the exhibition.

What emerges across these various bodies of work, which span the early 1960s until Thek’s untimely death in 1988, is a vision of the artist’s approach to painting as an activity that attests both to presence and absence. The exhibition celebrates the lasting mystery surrounding Thek as an extension of his enduring commitment to mythmaking.

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Robert Wilson.