Lucas Samaras

b. Kastoria, Greece, 1936; d. New York, NY, 2024

Lucas Samaras is an artist whose practice—spanning painting, assemblage, sculpture, photography, and performance—is defined by a tireless self-investigation. A figure of the Happenings movement of the 1950s and 60s alongside artists such as Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, and Claes Oldenberg, Samaras emphasized his ego and corporeal self in his art. He remained particularly committed to the themes of reflection and distortion, present in his sculptural mirror rooms, self-portraiture, and use of digital mirror-imaging, underscoring the transformative possibilities of the everyday.

Samaras emigrated with his family from Greece to the United States in 1948, settling in West New York, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick, studying under Allan Kaprow and George Segal, and then at Columbia University, where he studied art history under Meyer Schapiro. During this period, he initiated painting self-portraits from the front and back using a mirror, and began to explore figurative in geometric forms in rich colors and textures using pastels.

Samaras’s work evolved into assemblage reliefs and boxes comprised of elements culled from his immediate surroundings and five-and-dime stores—cutlery, nails, mirrors, brightly colored yarn, and feathers—affixed with liquid aluminum or plaster.

His first New York exhibition was held at Reuben Gallery in 1959, which came on the heels of his first group show at the gallery, Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Through his involvement at the Reuben Gallery and his participation in Happenings, Samaras met Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Claes Oldenburg. He had met Robert Whitman, another key figure in the Happenings movement, while at Rutgers and the two collaborated on performances. Samaras debuted his assemblage boxes in 1961 at Green Gallery, New York. His early boxes led to his inclusion in his first institutional group show, The Art of Assemblage, held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961. Samaras received his first major solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1969, which was followed by his first international museum exhibition, held at the Kunstverein Museum in Hanover (1970).

In 1969, Samaras began to expand upon his use of photography, experimenting with a Polaroid 360 camera, which appealed to his sense of immediacy. His innovation further materialized with his use of the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973 in a melding of self-portraiture and abstraction, created by manipulating the wet-dye emulsions with a stylus or fingertip before the chemicals set. This processed progressed with digital art in 1996 when he obtained his first computer and began to experiment with printed texts on typewriter paper. By 2002, he had acquired a digital camera and the use of Photoshop became an integral component of his practice. These technologies gave way to Photofictions (2003), a series characterized by distorted self-portraits and psychedelic compositions.