Dream of Vanishing

Over 50 paintings, sculptures, and drawings spanning Paul Thek's career from the early 1960s until his death in 1988, including never-before-seen works and his infamous wax "meat pieces."

Why go

First major New York survey since the 2010 Whitney retrospective, foregrounding Thek's painting practice alongside his celebrated Technological Reliquaries and featuring five previously unseen large-scale abstract scrolls from the 1970s that reveal his virtuosic draftsmanship.

What to expect

Paintings from Italy in the early 1960s, the "picture light" series of the 1970s, small colorful "bad paintings" from the 1980s, transparent vitrines containing lifelike wax sculptures of human flesh, abstract scrolls on paper, and selections from Thek's notebooks—which he considered artworks themselves.

Things to know

• First major New York survey since the 2010 Whitney Museum retrospective.
• Exhibition includes five previously unseen ten-foot scrolls gifted to Robert Wilson, the artist's collaborator and estate executor.
• Pace Publishing releases a facsimile edition of Thek's Notebook #41 from 1977 to coincide with the show.
• Thek's Technological Reliquaries (1964–1967) mixed Catholic religiosity with posthuman critique using carefully sculpted and painted wax.
• Artist disappeared from the New York art world in 1967, residing primarily on the Italian island of Ponza for nearly a decade.
• Final works address mortality and transience in response to his AIDS diagnosis.