Lucas Samaras

Across more than seven decades at the forefront of the avant-garde, Samaras’s work remained both profoundly personal and formally inventive. Drawing on elements of his personal history—from his childhood amid the Greek Civil War to his later experiences as part of the New York City’s avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s—he engaged sculpture photography, painting and drawing, and digital art to explore the nature of selfhood and identity. Samaras’s boxes, the works for which he best known, underscore his enduring interest in assemblage as an assertion of the self. Presented in dialogue with the sewn fabric works that Samaras called Reconstructions, they illustrate the artist’s uncanny ability to assemble and transform banal materials from the world around him into surreal, self-contained environments.

Although begun in the early 1960s, Samaras continued his box series over the course of the next three decades. In total, the series includes almost three hundred unique works. Boxes and Reconstructions highlights a selection illustrating the development of these works over time, from the relatively straightforward hinged construction of the rectangular Box #5 (1963–1968) to the sinuous yet also sinister curves of the Cor-ten steel Stiff Box #14 (1971) and the cosmic Box #133 (1989). “Samaras’s assemblage boxes continue their wicked, seductively beautiful ways,” wrote the critic Roberta Smith,

“only more so, since the artist knits together and patterns color, the ultimate tool of visual seduction, more complexly. [T]he viewer is cast as involuntary voyeur. . . everyday objects and materials take on unexpected lives of their own.” Possessing elements of sculpture, architecture, and painting, the boxes are some of Samaras’s most evocative and intimate works.

Boxes and Reconstructions places these objects in conversation with a group of works belonging to Samaras’s Reconstructions series of 1979. These works, which come from the personal collection of the artist, will be exhibited here for the first time. Like the boxes, Samaras’s complex compositions of hand-sewn fabrics incorporate a range of patterns, colors, textures, and shapes in extraordinarily active configurations. The use of fabric also has autobiographical connotations for the artist. “I had a cousin in Greece who had a dress shop,” he told Barbara Rose in 1978. “I would go there in the afternoon and I would cut up some paper. But, if I went to touch the fabric, she would say, ‘now watch it, don’t touch the fabric.’ When I became an adult, or semi-adult, I began using things like pins and wool, and nobody could tell me anymore, don’t use them, don't touch them. Even using the fabric, in a sense, is going back to childhood again.”

In part, the Reconstructions are homages to the textiles that surrounded Samaras in his youth, yet their overall effect is—like all of his work—harder to classify. Seen in the light of his later explorations in digital art and photography, the scramble of visual information they present can resemble distorted signals or a collection of pixels. Most of all, however, they suggest paintings. As art critic Kim Levin has written, “Samaras’s Reconstructions must be seen as paintings, highly sophisticated and completely perverse. Big dazzling abstractions. They are also variegated, witty, improvisational hybrid surfaces that fuse random and disparate materials into a seamless expressive whole. They reconstruct not folk handicraft but modernist art.”