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Lucas Samaras, Box #86, 1973, mixed media, 9-1/4" × 12-1/2" × 15" (23.5 cm × 31.8 cm × 38.1 cm) © Lucas Samaras

Lucas Samaras

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Details:

b. 1936, Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece
d. 2024, New York

Pace Publications:

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Eluding historical categorization, Lucas Samaras’s oeuvre is united through his consistent focus on the body and psyche, often emphasizing autobiography.

Themes of self-depiction and identity were a driving force behind his practice, which, at its onset in the early 1960s, advanced the Surrealist idiom while proposing a radical departure from the presiding themes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.

Growing up amidst the tragedies of the Second World War and Greek Civil War, and speaking no English, Samaras emigrated with his family from Greece to the United States in 1948, settling in West New York, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, studying under Allan Kaprow and George Segal, and then Columbia University, New York, where he studied art history under Meyer Schapiro. Samaras’s interest in self-investigation began during this period, when he initiated painting self-portraits from the front and back using a mirror. He gravitated toward the use of pastels, which enabled him to work quickly, exploring figurative and geometric forms in rich colors and luxuriant textures, characteristics that would reoccur throughout his work. He soon shifted toward objects, producing assemblage reliefs and boxes comprised of elements culled from his immediate surroundings and five-and-dime stores—cutlery, nails, mirrors, brightly colored yarn, and feathers—affixed with liquid aluminum or plaster. At the same time, Samaras was interested in acting and joined the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York. Although he ultimately did not pursue a career as an actor, he used the promotional headshots from the school to inform parts of his artistic practice.

The artist’s first solo exhibition in New York was held at Reuben Gallery in 1959, which came on the heels of his first group show at the gallery, Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959). Through his involvement at the Reuben Gallery and his participation in Happenings, Samaras met Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Claes Oldenburg, and collaborated on performances with fellow Rutgers cohort, Robert Whitman. Samaras debuted his assemblage boxes in 1961 at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery, New York. For the artist, the boxes possessed elements of sculpture, architecture, and painting, amplified by the inclusion of objects such as mirrors and photographs—additions that situated Samaras as one of the earliest artists to emphasize his ego and corporeal self in his art. His early boxes led to his inclusion in his first institutional group show, The Art of Assemblage, held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961.

In 1965, Samaras joined Pace Gallery, which mounted an exhibition of his works made between 1960 and 1966 that included Samaras’s immersive Room No. 2 (1966), also known as Mirrored Room. A culmination of his mirrored boxes, Room No. 2 was his first installation to become a part of a museum collection, acquired in 1966 by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York), where it remains on view as the centerpiece of their galleries. Samaras received his first major solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1969, which was followed by his first international museum exhibition, held at the Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (1970). By the mid-70s, he had also received his first large-scale commission for which he produced Silent Struggle (1976), a sculpture composed of Cor-ten steel, initially installed at the Hale Boggs Federal Courthouse in New Orleans, Louisiana.

In 1969, Samaras began to expand upon his photography practice, experimenting with a Polaroid 360 camera, which appealed to his sense of immediacy, turning the camera on himself for his iconic Auto Polaroid series (1969–71). His innovation further materialized with his use of the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973 in a melding of self-portraiture and abstraction, created by manipulating the wet-dye emulsions with a stylus or fingertip before the chemicals set. From 1979 to ’80, Samaras photographed dozens of prominent figures of the New York art world, culminating in the Sittings series, which included artists Simone Forti and Jasper Johns, Art in America editor Betsy Baker, and art dealers Sidney Janis, Arne Glimcher, and David Zwirner. His digital art progressed in 1996 when he obtained his first computer and began to experiment with printed texts on typewriter paper. By 2002, he had acquired a digital camera, and the use of Photoshop became an integral component of his practice. From the following year onward, he exclusively created images using computer technology. These advancements gave way to Photofictions (2003), a series characterized by distorted self-portraits and psychedelic compositions. Ultimately gesturing toward a larger investigation of (self) reflection in his work, found in his mirror rooms, self-portraiture, and use of digital mirror-imaging, Samaras’s oeuvre acts as an extension of his body while underscoring the transformative possibilities of the everyday—a true blurring of art and life.

Samaras's work has been featured in more than forty exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, including a solo presentation of his pastels in 1974. The Denver Art Museum, Colorado held a retrospective of his work in 1988, which traveled extensively nationwide to the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1988) (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.); High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1988–89); Center for the Fine Arts, Miami (1989); Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (1989); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1989). In 2003, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York presented a retrospective of his work, Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras. Samaras represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 2009; The Museum of Modern Art, New York subsequently acquired the work for its collection. In 2014, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York presented Lucas Samaras: Offerings from a Restless Soul, a solo exhibition which showcased over sixty works from the museum's collection. Reexamining one of the artist’s earliest mediums, The Morgan Library & Museum in New York mounted an exhibition of Samaras’s pastels in 2016. His long-term solo presentation opened in September of 2024 at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York. Works by Samaras are held in public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Iwaki City Art Museum, Japan; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

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Lucas Samaras, Reconstruction #41, 1978, sewn fabrics, 7' 11" x 9' 2" (241.3 x 279.4 cm) © Lucas Samaras

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Lucas Samaras, XYZ 0862 (Chinoiserie), 2012, pure pigment on paper mounted on Dibond, 35" x 62" x 1-1/4" (88.9 cm x 157.5 cm x 3.2 cm) © Lucas Samaras