LUCAS SAMARAS

This exhibition will mark the first solo presentation of Samaras’s work in his birthplace in nearly twenty years and will bring together works spanning his expansive and protean practice. It will also celebrate a nearly six-decade relationship between the artist and Pace, which has represented him exclusively since 1965.

Born in Kastoria, Greece, in 1936, and immigrating to the United States in 1948, Samaras created a groundbreaking body of work spanning sculpture, photography, painting, digital media, and wearable art. His practice profoundly interrogated selfhood, memory, and transformation, often using his own body as subject—a focus shaped in part by his involvement in the Happenings, a hybrid art form combining installation, performance, and other mediums, staged on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A key figure in the city’s mid-20th-century avant-garde, Samaras embraced this cross-disciplinary context to forge a singular path. In the decades that followed, his work consistently resisted easy categorization as he moved fluidly across figurative pastels, assemblage boxes, immersive mirrored rooms, Polaroid self-portraits, psychedelically colored paintings, and pioneering digital works.The exhibition at The Intermission will feature works made between the 1960s and the 2010s, including rarely exhibited sculptural jewelry. Examples of Samaras’s manipulated photographs from the late 1960s and early 1970s—the Auto Polaroids and Photo-Transformations—will be on view, alongside a selection of chromatically dense Mosaic Paintings, fabric Reconstructions, and pastel works on paper. A suite of sculptures, including examples from the artist’s Box series and other “transformed” utilitarian objects, will also figure.