Dream of Vanishing

Paul Thek (1933–1988) was a painter and sculptor whose work fused Catholic imagery, posthuman critique, and lyrical abstraction. He is best known for his Technological Reliquaries (1964–1967)—grotesque wax sculptures of human flesh cast in transparent vitrines—yet identified primarily as a painter. Thek's practice evolved across multiple mediums: early abstractions made in Italy, large-scale scrolls of watercolor and ink that evoke landscape through fields of black mark-making, and late "bad paintings" from the 1980s confronting mortality and AIDS. His notebooks, filled with watercolors, diary entries, poetry, and correspondence, were conceived as artworks unto themselves. Thek's deliberate periods of withdrawal from the New York art world—including a decade on the Italian island of Ponza—reflected his philosophy of artmaking as fugitive and subject to rebirth rather than fixed in history.