Five ten-foot scrolls, never seen before: Paul Thek at Pace, and why a painter crosses town for it

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 19, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Five ten-foot scrolls, never seen before: Paul Thek at Pace, and why a painter crosses town for it At a Glance Cross town. Five never-before-seen 10-foot scrolls and 50+ works at Pace, the first real Thek survey in New York since the Whitney in 2010, reframe him as a painter rather than a sculptor. Walk into 540 West 25th this week and the first thing the room will do is make you stop. Pace’s West 25th flagship has the ceiling height for it, and the curators have evidently used the height. Paul Thek: Dream of Vanishing opened on May 15 and runs through August 14, and the centrepiece is a suite of five large- scale scrolls from the 1970s that have never been shown before. Each one is ten feet long, on paper, abstract, worked in fields of black watercolor and ink. Pace’s own announcement is precise about the count and the scale: “five scrolls, previously unseen, each measure ten feet in length,” entirely abstract, in black watercolor and ink. Five ten-foot black-watercolor scrolls is not a footnote to Thek’s career. It is a quiet recategorisation. That sentence is the news of the show, and it is what makes it worth crossing town for. Why this is a painter’s show, not a sculptor’s show For most of the last fifty years, the Thek conversation has been about the meat pieces, the Technological Reliquaries of 1964 to 1967, the rotting ship-as-installation, the hippie travelogue, the catalogue of objects. The 2010 Whitney retrospective sealed that frame. Critics tend to enter Thek through the body and the artefact, not the brush. Dream of Vanishing breaks the frame. The five scrolls put a body of abstract painted work on paper at the centre of the room, paired with the early-1960s Italian painting s and the late 1980s canvases Thek made after his AIDS diagnosis. The painter on view here is closer in temperament to Cy Twombly’s brushy 1970s and to Brice Marden’s wet greys than to the Pop / counterculture sculptor of the textbook. Black watercolor on paper at ten feet is a sustained gestural decision, made fifty years ago, hidden until now. What a working painter looks at first is the surface and the hand. Did the watercolor wash get applied wet enough to bloom, or controlled enough to hold an edge? Did the ink go down over a still-damp watercolor field, or wait for the surface to dry and sit on top of it? Those decisions are what fifty years of art history have been missing from the Thek record, and they are about to be visible in a room ten feet tall. The installation choice to watch in the room The curatorial line-up is Arne Glimcher, Pace’s founder and chairman, with Noah Khoshbin of the Paul Thek Foundation and Pace’s chief curator Oliver Shultz. The exhibition pulls together more than fifty works of painting , sculpture, and drawing, spanning the early 1960s through Thek’s death in 1988, alongside his notebooks, correspondences, watercolours, diary entries, and poetry. A parallel solo presentation at Galerie Buchholz ac