Paul Thek valuation
Made wax meat in Plexiglas cases, a pink ziggurat with his own effigy inside, and small, tender paintings on newspaper.
Paul Thek (1933–1988) was born in Brooklyn and studied at the Art Students League, Pratt Institute and the Cooper Union, from which he graduated in 1954.
What a work by Paul Thek is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Paul Thek (1933–1988) was born in Brooklyn and studied at the Art Students League, Pratt Institute and the Cooper Union, from which he graduated in 1954. His Technological Reliquaries, made between 1964 and 1967, are wax sculptures of raw meat and parts of the body sealed in Plexiglas vitrines with the bright, clinical finish of Pop and Minimal art, turning that finish inside out. The Tomb of 1967, a pink ziggurat holding a wax figure cast from his own body, is his best-known work. A Fulbright fellowship took him to Italy that year, and for most of the following decade he lived in Europe, making large collaborative environments with a group of friends — The Procession at the Stedelijk Museum in 1969, Pyramid at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1971, Ark, Pyramid at documenta 5 in 1972 — and, alongside them, a great many small paintings on sheets of newspaper. He returned to New York in 1976 and taught at the Cooper Union.
The environments were mostly temporary and the reliquaries are rare and largely in museums, so what usually comes to market is painting: small works on newspaper from the late 1960s and 1970s, and later small paintings on canvas board of skies, seas, cities, animals and religious subjects. Newsprint is acidic and brittle, so the condition of the sheet, its toning and any tears or losses at the edges are central to a valuation. A provenance traced to the period, or through the dealers who have handled his estate, is the usual reference.
Brooklyn, the Reliquaries and the processions
Paul Thek: Diver, a retrospective, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2010 and travelled to the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum.
His work is in the Hirshhorn Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Kolumba museum in Cologne, and is on permanent display at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center on Long Island.
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