Also featuring Franz Deckwitz, Peter Hujar, Edwin Klein, Cindy Lubar Bishop, Gregory Markopoulos, Linda Rosenkrantz, Wahundra (Lee Fitzgerald), Harald Szeemann, Ann Wilson, Robert Wilson

In 1973, the American artist Paul Thek (1933–1988) realized, along with his friends, the Artist’s Coop, the environment “Ark, Pyramid, Easter – A Visiting Group Show” at the Museum of Art Lucerne. The exhibition was the fourth in a series of what are today seen as the most significant atmospheric large-scale projects of the 1970s using individualized religious symbols. These installations, now lost, are also among the central works of the legendary artist. The goal of Paul Thek, in Process is to memorialize Thek’s spatial work of that time and to locate it within a larger historical context. As exhibition, documentation and inscenation the series of exhibitions also investigate the status of ephemeral materials in exhibitions, the boundaries of the artwork, institutional history, reception, and today’s practice of re-inscenation integrating ideas of an archaeological research and a transparent, revealing art mediation. As a result, the project  follows Paul Thek’s travels across Europe and is and will be shown in different forms at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, at the Museum of Art Lucerne  and at the Moderna Museet Stockholm.

In comparison with the stages of the exhibition in Duisburg and Stockholm, in Lucerne Thek’s idea of collaborative working practice plays a particularly important part. In 1973 the artist officially abandoned individual authorship for the first time and made the collective working method the subject of the exhibition itself. Consequently, in Paul Thek, in Process (Lucerne), some of the artists who worked in the Artist’s Coop will be introduced, such as Franz Deckwitz, Edwin Klein, Cindy Lubar, Peter Hujar, Ann Wilson and Robert Wilson.