Paul Thek at The Whitney

After seeing The Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, I took the Madison Avenue bus up to The Whitney to see the Paul Thek retrospective.

I had never heard of this artist before, but a friend is a big fan and told me to check out the show.

I liked his work a lot, but was much, much more drawn to the sculptures and installations that I was to the drawings and paintings.

He is famous for a sculpture series called Meat Pieces, and these were my favorite. Shiny, wet and ultra real, these visceral sculptures of meat have a vivid, super alive presence to them. Icky, strange, confusing and gorgeously hideous.

His installations were made of pieces of hospital-like furniture, with pulleys and fixtures on them, slabs of meat, and dead birds. These works have a sense of decay and destruction, violence and loss to them.