Lucas Samaras was a Greek artist most known for his experimental self-portraits taken with a Polaroid camera. Working across photography, painting, sculpture, installation, prints, and performance, Samaras' diverse practice explores themes of identity self-depiction.
Read MoreSamaras was born in Kastoria, Greece. In 1948, he moved to New York and studied art at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he met artists Allan Kaprow, George Segal, and Roy Lichtenstein. During this period, Samaras became interested in performance art. In 1959, he was invited to show work in Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) group show at Reuben Gallery in New York.
In the early 1960s, Samaras began developing assemblage boxes, combining objects such as photographs and mirrors with elements of sculpture, painting, and architecture. The use of mirrors and photographs in these artworks marked Samaras' initial exploration of the ego and human physicality. His assemblage boxes were exhibited in the group show The Art of Assemblage (1961) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Similar to Samaras' assemblage boxes, Book 4 (1962) is an intricate art object with a depth of imagined narrative. The sculptural book contains eight fictional stories written by Samaras between 1959 and 1967, and includes unusual details like pockets, foldouts, and pop-ups.
Lucas Samaras' Room No. 2 (1966) is one of the artist's most well-known works. Inspired by the avantgarde Fluxus movement, Samaras uses mirrors to create an infinity effect. It is one of the first installations to invite viewers to become active participants.
Room No. 2 was also the artist's first work to become part of a permanent museum collection, purchased by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo in 1966.
In the 1970s, Samaras began to focus on photography, particularly Polaroid photography. In 1973 he was asked to experiment with the new SX-70 camera for an exhibition at the Light Gallery in New York.
In the resulting 'Photo-Transformations' series, Samaras scratched and scraped the wet dye emulsion of developing Polaroid photographs to distort his self-portraits. By doing so, the artist altered and disguised his face, creating surrealist and abstract imagery. His iconic series extended the boundaries of photography by manipulating the physicality of photographs.
Chair Transformation Number 20B (1996) is an abstract sculpture that transforms the mundane object of a chair into a nonsensical thing of artistic splendour, drawing from Marcel Duchamp's readymades. In the work, Samaras stacked multiple chairs on top of one another to create an illusion of a staircase leading up to the sky. The sculpture appears to be upright, slanting backwards, or leaning forwards, depending on the viewing angle.
Samaras was responsive to digital technology and the new possibilities they opened up for image production and self-imagery. After acquiring his first computer in 1996 and digital camera in 2002, the artist went on to create such works as 'Photofiction' series (2003), which used Photoshop to create self-portraits and abstractions suspended between reality and fantasy.
In 2021, Samaras reprised 'XYZ' (2010–2012), a series of digitally-made psychedelic abstractions, as his first NFT project.
In 2002, Samaras received an American Academy Award in Art. In 2009, he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition that spanned four decades of his practice.
Samaras exhibited internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Dia:Beacon, New York (2024); Pace Gallery, New York (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014).
Group exhibitions include Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2018); documenta 14 (2017); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015).
Samaras is represented by Pace Gallery. He joined Pace Gallery in 1965, after which the gallery presented an exhibition of his works made between 1960 and 1966.
Phoebe Bradford | Ocula | 2024
