Paul Thek’s Italian experiences between 1962 and 1976 left a deep mark on his sensitivity. From his visits to the Capuchin Catacombs to his witnessing of spectacular religious processions, Italy was a catalyst for several key moments in the artist’s career, triggering an elusive reaction in his practice to the trajectories of post-war American art. By reworking the stimuli gathered during his stays in Rome, on the island of Ponza and in Sicily, Paul Thek concocted a baroque response to Pop Art and Minimalism, which were dominant on the art scene of the time.

Texts by Nicola Del Roscio, Peter Benson Miller, Owen Laub, Robert Wilson. Designed by Francesca Biagiotti.

From 1962 to 1976, Paul Thek traveled to Italy, for multiple extended stays. In Rome, he discovered ancient sculpture, the achievements of the Renaissance, the Baroque churches, but above all the contemporary artistic effervescence of the capital. In Sicily, with his friend the photographer Peter Hujar, he was confronted with the question of death through reliquaries, religious processions or the extraordinary Capuchin catacombs. On the island of Ponza, he immersed himself in an ecstatic Mediterranean lifestyle, in osmosis with nature and the sea in particular.

Paul Thek in Process: Commentaries on/of an Exhibition includes all research material which was made public in different formats in the exhibition series Paul Thek in Process. The exhibition was born out of the desire to memorialise Paul Thek’s spatial work that the artist realised in Europe in the 1970s and to make it possible to experience it in a larger historic context. Thanks to the historic distance, the latter is possible today. As exhibition, documentation and inscenation at the same time, the project not only traced the tracks of a lost artistic practice, but also questioned the importance of ephemeral material in exhibition contexts, the boundaries of the artwork, the exhibition and institution history, the reception and today’s practice of re-inscenation. The publication is conceived as a work list, a biography and a history of objects, an image documentation of the exhibitions and, last but not least, as a self-critical curatorial review on this past project.

This publication is devoted to a little-known temporary artwork of Thek’s, made in the winter of 1973/74 while he was a guest of the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. His expansive environment Ark, Pyramid–Christmas (“The Manger”) filled a whole room. This exhibition, organised by the director of the museum at the time, Siegfried Salzmann, was the fourth in Thek’s series of atmospheric, large-scale projects in Europe, which engaged with individualised religious symbols. The festive period provided Thek with the occasion to present, for the first time, a self-written theatre piece in the form of a nativity play featuring children from Duisburg. A great quantity of original material and documents have been discovered in the museum’s repository and enable a reconstruction of the exhibition in this book, accompanied by an interview that Marietta Franke conducted with Franz Deckwitz, who helped with the installation in 1973.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Diözesanmuseum Köln zu Gast: Paul Thek at Kunst-Station St. Peter in Köln, 29 March–29 June, 1997.

Catalogue produced for Documenta 5, 30 June and 8 October 1972 in Kassel, Germany. The artistic director Harald Szeemann channeled many of the curatorial concepts for the exhibition into the design of the catalogue itself.

Including artists such as; Art & Language, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Hanne Darboven, Hans Haacke, Edward Kienholz, David Lamelas, Agnes Martin, Paul Thek, Franz Erhard Walther, La Monte Young, & Marian Zazeela, Richard Tuttle, Paul Sharits, Gustav Metzger, Mario Merz, Joan Jonas, Eva Hesse, Dan Graham, Joseph Cornell, Tony Conrad, Stan Brakhage, KP Brehmer, James Lee Byars, Daniel Buren, stanley brouwn, Lothar Baumgarten amongst others.

Cover designed by Ed Ruscha.