The Nicola Del Roscio Foundation presents from Tuesday 13 February to Friday 5 April 2024 “Ghostwriting Paul Thek: Time Capsules and Reliquaries”, a solo exhibition by Alessandro Di Pietro, created thanks to the support of the Italian Council (XI edition, 2022), program of international promotion of Italian art by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, and curated by Peter Benson Miller and Cornelia Mattiacci.

The exhibition itinerary is made up of a nucleus of new sculptures, a painting and a video by Alessandro Di Pietro, conceived in relation to the life and work of the American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988). During his residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2017, Di Pietro began working on a fictional story in which Thek would not disappear prematurely, but would continue his practice as an artist post-mortem. Consciously blending fact and fiction, the project evokes Thek's lasting and ghostly impact on the work of today's artists.

“My intent was to work as Paul Thek's ghostwriter” explains Di Pietro “I continued his mysterious narratives with my language, adapting it to the discourses surrounding today's history: socio-political narratives and facts of our time. My process was to imagine how a story – in this case, the story of an artist's work – would continue if it were not interrupted.” Ghostwriting Paul Thek: Time Capsules and Reliquaries follows Di Pietro's recent residency and exhibition at the Watermill Center in New York (USA), a center of contemporary experimentation and official home of a substantial nucleus of Thek's works and documents. The context of the Watermill triggered the genesis of Race of a Hippie, the short film made in collaboration with the No Text Azienda studio, inspired by Thek's iconic sculpture The Tomb (often called Death of a Hippie), from 1967. Now lost , The Tomb consisted of a life-size cast of the artist's body placed inside a ziggurat, bringing death and resurrection to the scene at the same time. Together with the documentary film Race of A Hippie, the exhibition features the sculptures Baby Cast, Br'er Rabbit, To Wong and the painting Television/Collaboration, works that give shape to subversive artistic strategies, drawing on biographical and social facts of a continuous present, which from the 1960s extends to the contemporary. Balancing fact and fiction and exploring questions of influence, appropriation and attribution, and artistic agency in the United States, the exhibition highlights the legacy of Paul Thek's enduring and elusive work.