- Exhibition catalog
Paul Thek: Tales the Tortoise Taught Us (English)
Retrospective in the Context of Today's Contemporary Art
2008
© ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Type of publication
- Exhibition catalog
- Publishing house, place
- Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln
- Physical Description
- 154 p. : chiefly ill.
- Language
- English
- Year
- 2008
- ISBN
- 978-3-86560-390-6
- Content
- There are artists who are not forgotten because other artists frequently
refer to them as examples. Paul Thek is among those. He enjoys cult status. This book finally fills the hiatus of a survey publication. It is a compendium in three parts: In their essay with the fairytale-like
title »Tales the Tortoise Taught Us« Margit Brehm, Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt
speak about the artist’s ambivalent relation to his American homeland
»Turtle Island«, they recount Thek’s unusual but at the same time typical
artistry in the Beat- and Hippiegeneration. Thek defies the serial art of Pop
Art as mere consumer art, pursuing his own ways in “technological relics,”
Thek’s reply to Pop Art.
The second part is a chronologically arranged survey of works from 1963 up to Paul Thek’s tragical AIDS death in 1988. The chronologically arranged biography in the third part describes in detail the stations of his artistic life with numerous original quotations.
