Lucas Samaras

In tandem with the Albums, the exhibition features a selection of Samaras’s Polaroid works from the 1960s and 1970s, including the Sittings series (1979-80), in which Samaras photographed various prominent figures in the New York art world posing naked in his studio. The presentation draws connections between the artist’s pioneering and perverse manipulations of the Polaroid in the 1970s and his use of digital media over the past two decades. Focusing on art making as a daily practice, the exhibition underscores Samaras’s unflagging commitment to audacious and provocative experimentation with technologies of the image and of the self.

Presented on custom screens that preserve the rectangular format of the works as originally composed—while mirroring the original shape of Polaroid film—Samaras’s Albums serve as an auto-retrospective. The artist collects, scans, and reproduces works from his entire oeuvre, many of which have long since dispersed into museum collections and are available to him only through exhibition catalogues in his studio. These become the basis for myriad new works, which reshape, reimagine, and recontextualize the original images in ways that capture the artifice of the digital. Samaras’s six new Albums chronicle the artist’s own evolution, transforming more than seven decades of his artistic life into material for an illustrated auto-history, refracted by the lens of contemporary technology.

Samaras considers each of his six new Albums individual artworks. As digital archives of his daily practice, they interweave straight documentation of earlier works with entirely new digital artworks that the artist has created over the past decade using digital imaging software. Often recomposing visual elements in a bricolage of his own past together with new self-portraits taken on his iPhone inside his home and studio in midtown Manhattan—as well as images overlooking the city taken from his sixty-second story windows—Samaras remains a scavenger of the self. He consumes and absorbs his own history, digests it, melts it down in a crucible of a restless and unceasing imagination, before recrystallizing it in his ever-expanding archive of self-imagining.