The publication documents an artistic practice that is fundamentally process-based, materially experimental, and resistant to stable form.

Paul Thek’s work unfolds across sculpture, painting, drawing, and large-scale installation, often privileging impermanence, fragility, and transformation over durability or finish. His use of organic and ephemeral materials—such as wax, fabric, paper, and found elements—foregrounds decay, vulnerability, and corporeality as central aesthetic and conceptual concerns.

Rather than treating artworks as autonomous objects, Thek developed immersive environments in which individual components function relationally. These installations operate as temporal constellations, shaped by intuition, spiritual inquiry, and an acute sensitivity to space. Repetition, variation, and provisional assembly are recurring strategies, allowing meaning to emerge through accumulation rather than resolution.

The book situates this practice within the broader context of postwar art, highlighting Thek’s critical position in relation to Minimalism, while emphasizing his divergence from its emphasis on industrial form and permanence. Through extensive visual documentation and scholarly analysis, the publication reveals how Thek’s work negotiates themes of embodiment, transcendence, and mortality, positioning art as a lived, ethical, and existential process rather than a fixed product.

As such, the volume functions not only as a retrospective survey but as a research tool that articulates Thek’s contribution to post-minimal and installation-based art practices, offering sustained insight into an oeuvre defined by openness, instability, and experiential depth.