Kenny Schachter has just curated a new show of Paul Thek’s work at Thomas Dane Gallery, in collaboration with Jonathan Anderson
“I haven’t slept in three days – I’m like 27 if not for the hair,” says Kenny Schachter. Eight coffees in, and seemingly unfazed by the rather harrowing flight over here, Schachter is bouncing around Thomas Dane Gallery in St. James’s, dressed in his trademark Adidas tracksuit bottoms. “Being here, I feel like a kid with boundless energy and enthusiasm, and it hasn’t changed since the second I laid eyes on the work of Paul Thek.”
Schachter’s love affair with the late American artist dates back to the early ’90s. It was the early days of Kenny Schachter as we now know him, long before Artnetgave him reins on a column, offering unfiltered critiques of the art world, or Sotheby’s held yearly ‘Hoarder’ auctions to help clear out his overflowing collection. Schachter, pretty fresh out of a law degree (yes, really), saw ‘The Wonderful World That Almost Was’, Thek’s 1995 retrospective at Witte de With (now the Kunstinstituut Melly) in Rotterdam. There, he came face to face with Technological Reliquaries (1964–1967), Thek’s series of hyper-realistic wax sculptures depicting hunks of flesh encased in Plexiglass containers. Having lost his mother early in life to a brain tumour, and watching this degenerative physical disease taking over her body, these sculptures – capturing the fleeting characteristics of flesh and life – moved Schachter to tears.
Kenny Schachter photographed by Finn Constantine
Kenny Schachter photographed by Finn Constantine
Thek had died just a few years earlier, in 1988, from an AIDS-related illness. He was 54. Technological Reliquaries had catapulted him to early fame, his idiosyncratic approach challenging the polished aesthetics of Pop and the cool detachment of Minimalism taking hold in New York at the time. But Thek recoiled from success. Alongside Death of a Hippie (1967) – a wax figure cast of his own body – he abruptly abandoned the “meat pieces” altogether, exiling himself to Europe with his then-partner, photographer Peter Hujar. They stayed for nine years. It was in this period that he turned to painting and drawing – on newspaper, in sketchbooks – offering quieter, more delicate mediations on his life.
This brings us back to London, to ‘Seized by Joy: Paintings 1965–1988’, the first exhibition in the U.K. dedicated to Thek’s painting practice. Curated by Schachter, and installed by fashion designer Jonathan Anderson, the show features paintings, drawings, and sketchbook pages that trace this lesser-known thread of Thek’s practice.
“I just DM’d him,” Schachter says on the collaboration. “I’d set up a Google alert for the people I care about. Jonathan’s name popped up – he was referencing Thek in some shirts – and I thought: ‘What the fuck?’ I’ve got to get in touch with this guy!’”
Kenny Schachter photographed by Finn Constantine
“Thek was able to say more in one small sketch than any of those vacuous ten-metre tall canvases swirling around New York in the ‘70s.”
That was eight years ago. But Anderson had been on the Thek train for some time before then, assiduously collecting his work with the same dedication he’s given to Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. “When I fall in love with something I get very obsessive about it,” Anderson told Gagosian Quarterly. “Paul Thek is one of my all-time favourite historical artists. I struggle to think how people like Damien Hirstwould exist without Paul Thek.” Beyond shirts, Anderson has incorporated these names into his runway shows – most recently staging Loewe’s Spring/Summer 2025 show with Thek’s bronze mice, Hujar’s photography, and the 1966 book of essays Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag, a close friend of both artists. “Anderson deploys art on his runway shows in ways that I’ve never seen before,” Schachter adds. Schachter had less praise for art collaborations led by other fashion brands (“Louis Vuitton”) with “stupid commercial” artists (“Takashi Murakami”).
I arrive at Thomas Dane Gallery to meet Schachter, armed with a notebook full of questions. But – as I’m sure his well-worn editors at Artnet, the lawyers who’ve fielded threats over his exposés, and his own children, who often tell him to get off Instagram, can all attest – once Kenny Schachter is fired up, there’s no slowing him down. And few subjects ignite him quite like Paul Thek. So, without drawing breath – occasionally pausing to say, “Wow, that was an extremely long sentence” – I parked my questions and, in the throes of a heavy bout of food poisoning, was more than happy to sit back and listen.
“Thek was able to say more in one small sketch than any of those vacuous ten-metre tall canvases swirling around New York in the ‘70s,” Schachter begins. We’re standing in front of one of Thek’s A4 sketchbook drawings, part of a series of 35 framed pages on view. Or rather, 33 by the time I arrived: Schachter had taken two off the wall and had slipped them into his bag: “I told the gallery, these two have to come with me. When I’m abroad, I need to spend whatever time I can in close proximity to his work.” Schachter never met Paul Thek. “But just to be close – to smell him, his indefatigable energy and single-mindedness – that would have been enough.”
Kenny Schachter photographed by Finn Constantine
Kenny Schachter photographed by Finn Constantine
Thoughts, writings, musings, up moments, down moments, cycles of being, are scrawled onto these lined pages, offering an unfiltered window into Thek’s mind. “Use weakness as a way to people, not strength,” reads a particularly beautiful one. “I feel lonely and full. Learn how to break the ice.” The grid of framed drawings feature self-portraits, rosaries – Thek was (more or less) a devout Catholic – and timepieces. Time, he once wrote, was “an inevitable impurity from which we all suffer”, and it’s a theme he continued to reference: life’s short, so make it count.
And he did. When he left for Europe in 1967, he landed some pretty major shows: at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1969, and one at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1971. The Netherlands, it seems, were big fans too. He was included in documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, and the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1980. But this was a time before Instagram and OVRs, when being out of sight often meant being out of mind. You had to be in spitting distance from the scene you wanted to be part of for gallerists and curators to remember you were still alive. “So when Thek picked up sticks and moved to Italy, he was dead to the New York art world,” explains Schachter. By the time he returned in 1976, what he knew of that world had changed. Monumental, macho works by Julian Schnabel, Enzo Cucchi, and Francesco Clemente – collectively known as the ‘Transavanguardia’ movement – were now the big stars.
Disillusioned, Thek responded with a sardonic body of works he felt New York deserved – some of which hang here. ‘If you want shitty work, I’ll give you shitty work,’ he thought. Yet even in these, there’s the same rigour and tenacity that marked everything he did, whether acting in spaghetti Westerns in Italy or cleaning hospital rooms in New York. His whole life was a paradigm of doggedness and perseverance. The newspaper series – many now on view in London – was a daily ritual he never abandoned. Even as his health declined, he kept at it with near-military discipline. You just have to look at the extraordinary watercolours he made on Fire Island in his final years, explains Schachter, drinking, smoking, sexing, living – all while producing work that feels both urgent and centuries old, part abstract, part figurative, and arguably the highlight of the show.
Kenny Schachter photographed by Finn Constantine
“I think my time will come so I don’t want to FORCE it, or push it,” Thek wrote. “…because then it will come and then be OVER, so I’d rather wait longer and perhaps enjoy it more.” But, of course, time was not on Thek’s side – nor on the side of so many of his contemporaries whose lives were cut short from AIDS-related illnesses, unable to live out the commercial successes that their inventions deserved. When Hujar died penniless in 1987, he left his entire estate to Stephen Koch, a professor at Columbia University, fearing his parents would chuck away his work, for there was no market. He couldn’t have imagined the dedication of gallerists like Maureen Paley today, or the posthumous recognition: from a show in Venice during the 2024 Biennale, to London’s Raven Row earlier this year. Martin Wong is another: dead at 53, his extraordinary output largely overlooked at the time, now honoured with major retrospectives at Camden Art Centre in London, and KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin (both 2023).
For Thek, the real achievement was not market recognition or historical validation, according to Schachter. He never codified his artworks. He never took inventories. He never did a consignment agreement. He had no provisions for that. He wasn’t interested. When Thek decided to stop showing Death of a Hippie (1967) – the artwork that every gallery in New York was lining up to show after its Whitney success – he left it in storage, and never paid the bill, so it got thrown away. “For Thek, doing was succeeding,” says Schachter. “To work in the way that he worked: not looking for money, not looking for quid pro quo, totally anti-transactional. That’s the way art should be.”
