Rotterdam Cultural Histories #4: Paul Thek at the Lijnbaancentrum

The Lijnbaancentrum
The Lijnbaancentrum played a key position in Rotterdam as a platform for contemporary art and other cultural activity from 1970-1984. Located in the center of the city, it presented a broad range of forms of art and culture through playful and associative exhibitions.

Paul Thek and Rotterdam
In 1978-79 the Lijnbaancentrum in Rotterdam organised the exhibition ‘Jack’s Procession: What’s Going on Here?’ with Paul Thek (US, 1933-1988), displaying an environment that filled the entire exhibition space of the center. Thek had created large-scale environments in a number of European institutions in the late sixties and early seventies, this installation in Rotterdam was one of the last that he made in Europe.

The environment represented a dreamy landscape that contained some of the religious, spiritual and political symbols Thek had used before, but also showed new iconographic elements that were, in his eyes, “typical for Rotterdam”. He integrated snapshots and newspaper clippings concerning environmental issues in the Rotterdam area, and asked a sand sculptor to create a tower, inspired by Rotterdam’s ‘The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel I’ from the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Archival presentation
Rotterdam Cultural Histories #4 featured a archival material and a series of photographs of Thek’s environment, loans from the Municipal Archive Rotterdam, most of which had never been shown or published before. The presentation included a video compilation made for ‘The Wonderful World That Almost Was’, the very first retrospective exhibition of Thek in 1995 at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.

This edition was curated by Adelheid Smit (Witte de With) and conceived in collaboration with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which presented the exhibition and book ‘Please Write!‘ on Paul Thek alongside Rotterdam Cultural Histories #4.