Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze

125 Newbury is proud to present Lucas Samaras: Chalk and Bronze, an exhibition of two distinct yet related bodies of work by the Greek-born American artist, a pivotal figure in the New York avant-garde. This presentation brings a selection of more than two dozen vibrant, never-before-seen pastels from the 1960s into dialogue with a suite of figurative bronze sculptures that Samaras created in the early 1980s. 

Samaras began employing pastels at a young age, partly as a means of communication. After his family emigrated from Greece to the United States during the 1940s to escape the country’s brutal civil war, Samaras, who spoke no English upon his arrival in America, saw pastels as an outlet for his inner world. “Art was the only thing I could do without speaking,” the artist explained in an interview, “They just gave me paper and pastels, and I drew.” He carried this interest through high school and college, studying under the influential artists Allan Kaprow and George and Helen Segal at Rutgers University.

Known for his critical role in the Happenings movement of the late 1950s, his enigmatic sculptural boxes and chairs, and his expansive and protean photographic practice, Samaras’s comparatively lesser known work in pastel was nevertheless integral to his practice. “One might say that the pastels are the foundation of Samaras’s work,” explains Arne Glimcher, curator of the exhibition and the artist’s friend and dealer for over 50 years, “It was in pastel that he invented not only his palette but himself.” Samaras first exhibited his pastels at New York’s Green Gallery in the early 1960s. More recently, these works were the subject of a major 2016 exhibition at The Morgan Library.

The selection of pastels included in this exhibition reflects Samaras’s deep interest in the lurid, almost vulgarly chromatic possibilities—and the powdery materiality—of the medium. Many of the works consist of self-portraits, where faces or body parts appear fragmented or contorted, rendered in stark contrast against monochromatic backgrounds. Elsewhere, the face merges with its prismatic surroundings, threatening the solidity of the body’s border with the world.

Relentless and constantly shapeshifting in his pursuit of formal evolution, Samaras turned towards the medium of bronze on only a few occasions throughout his long career. In this suite of works created during the early 1980s, he explored concerns of flesh and figure through an almost alchemical treatment of metal. Like his early pastels, the bronzes evoke the softness of the body, improbably transmuting the hardness of metal into the tenderness of flesh. The resulting sculptures are among the only figurative images that Samaras created which are not self-portraits. Instead, they seem to speak to a more generalized notion of the human condition––what it might look or feel like to inhabit a body from the inside out, externalizing an otherwise inaccessible interiority. If the pastels embody meditations on a vibrant mode of life-turned-art, the bronzes represent their contorted doubles.

Small in scale but capacious in their emotional depth, Samaras’s bronze figures offer visions of twisting or perhaps melting bodies. Often plated with silver or gold, they fold over and into themselves as flesh might. Figures recline alone or appear intertwined with one another. Moments of embrace reveal themselves in the murky shimmer of the metal. The boundaries between agony and ecstasy, between self and other, begin to dissolve.

Presented together for the first time since a 1982 exhibition at Pace Gallery, these two bodies of work feed into and inform one another. Together, they reflect the artist’s unflinching exploration of what it felt like to inhabit his own body, both in the physical and psychic registers. As a pastel face dissolves into polychrome rays of light, a bronze body takes shape from its primordial ground, producing a sense of struggle that distills Samaras’s lifelong investigation of the nature of selfhood and embodiment.

To learn more about this exhibition, visit (opens in a new window) 125newbury.com.