"Untitled (Hand With Ring)," Paul Thek, 1967
(Editor's note: Ron Lambert is our artist of the month for September. For this post, he's written about the three artists he thinks everyone should know about. For more on Ron, look here, here and here.)
One artist I have kept coming back to in the last couple of years is Paul Thek, particularly after seeing his retrospective at the Whitney a couple of years ago. I am particularly into his work from the late ’60s and early ’70s. He really found a way of putting ideas together that are visually striking at first, but the longer you look at them the quieter they become. He was an incredible artist — definitely an artist’s artist. He was in and out of popularity with galleries, but always an influence on the artist community. His meat boxes pointed out the fault in minimalism, but instead of making snide, sarcastic reflections on what minimalism was, he made amazing pieces that showed another possibility.
