Paul Thek: Dream of Vanishing presents more than fifty paintings, sculptures, and drawings spanning Thek's career from the early 1960s through his death in 1988, including a suite of never-before-seen ten-foot scrolls gifted to Robert Wilson. The exhibition foregrounds Thek's painting practice — long overshadowed by his infamous Technological Reliquaries, the wax "meat pieces" that skewered Minimalism and Pop with Catholic grotesquerie — tracing his work from Italian canvases through the "bad paintings" of his final years, made in the face of an AIDS diagnosis. Taking its title from a line in one of his notebooks, the show honors Thek's lifelong preoccupation with disappearance, erasure, and the ephemeral.
