Paul Thek19882010Whitney Museum of American Art

54196931

19331960198854AIDS

American Art Catalogues presents Paul Thek: Untitled Sketchbook, a facsimile of a notebook from 1969 in which Thek, during his too-brief lifetime, sketched, scribbled, and simmered images and ideas. Featuring thirty-one drawings that have never before been shown publicly, the book is filled with searching self-portraits, likely sketched in a mirror as an act of self-reflection. (No one has ever interested me quite as much as myself, he once wrote.) Nearby pages feature images of Christ wearing a crown of thorns alongside strange still lifes: of a crucifix lying next to an empty ashtray, of a mushroom growing what looks like a corkscrew tail, and other of his visions.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, Thek first gained attention in the 1960s. His pathbreaking installations, performances, and paintings addressed the body and mortality, which feel in hindsight hauntingly prescient of his death in 1988 at the age of fifty-four of AIDS.I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, he said, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at that momentwhich may explain why his art remains so potent here in the present.