Online

Lucas Samaras

Gestures and Constructions

Feb 9 – Feb 28, 2021

The work of Lucas Samaras is studded with prophecies and prescriptions for life under conditions of isolation.

“I’ve been alone for 20 years,” Samaras remarked at the outset of the Covid crisis, “so being in my apartment now, again, is not a big deal. All that’s different now is the possible destruction of all of the things that you knew were around.” Those things included the throngs of tourists, visitors, and office workers who normally packed the streets of the artist’s Midtown Manhattan neighborhood each day, and which suddenly disappeared with the outbreak of the pandemic.

This online exhibition features two bodies of work completed in late 2020, when Samaras photographed the emptied streets and paused construction sites around his neighborhood. In his Gestures series (2008 - ), he populates these images with a cast of creaturely “performers”—brightly-colored gestural abstractions that suggest figures—transforming the city into theatrical backdrop. In his concurrent Constructions (2008 - ), empty worksites morph into surreal landscapes that both fascinate and threaten. Through his digital manipulations—strange mirrorings, unnatural saturations, and compositional fractures—Samaras maps the thresholds between his own personal cosmos and the world outside, registering the increasingly frayed edges of our shared reality.

The exhibition coincides with the featuring of Lucas Samaras’s Gestures series on the (opens in a new window) cover of the January / February 2021 issue of Artforum. Samaras is the first and only artist to have been granted four cover features for the magazine. To mark the occasion, the artist spoke to editor-in-chief David Velasco—who describes these recent works as “one of the great projects of quarantine”— in a recorded conversation via Zoom.

I want my works to help you see, like a surgeon. When you open it up, it’s gutsy stuff.

Lucas Samaras

The power of Samaras's art lies primarily in the way he takes the familiar to unfamiliar extremes.

Roberta Smith

There’s a feeling that these chromatic tendrils were already alive, channeling themselves through Samaras... immigrants from some distant axon in the nervous system of spectacle.

David Velasco

His is a melancholy and saturnine character. The fragments he tears away from time are merely the fine dust of a loss of self; they are the gray testimony to an incomprehensible whole.

Germano Celant

No other artist has developed so full an iconography of both the privilege and predicament of selfhood, an iconography wrested organically out of life itself, presented to the world with an unabashed honesty and an insistence—or demonstration, really—that art is a force through which a world may be recovered, though shaped anew, from its ruins.

Thomas McEvilley

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Videos

Artforum: Under the Cover

David Velasco in Conversation with Lucas Samaras

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To inquire about works by Lucas Samaras, email inquiries@pacegallery.com.

Lucas Samaras

Eluding historical categorization, Lucas Samaras’s oeuvre is united through its consistent focus on the body and psyche, often emphasizing autobiography. The theme of self-depiction and identity has been a driving force behind his practice, which, at its onset in the early 1960s, advanced the Surrealist idiom yet proposed a radical departure from the presiding themes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.

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Past, Lucas Samaras, Gestures and Constructions, Feb 9, 2021