ART-PRESENTATION: Lucas Samaras-Me, Myself and…
Lucas Samaras is not the best-known artist in America, but among the experts he is considered a wizard, and among artists he’s an elusive legend, a loner, eccentric, master of unusual media, and visionary. cannot be classified in any category, norm or trend. He is well known for his self-portraits printed in polaroid film, which he later on processes and shapes, the “photo-transformations”, as he calls them.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Me, Myself and…” tracks Lucas Samaras’s own history alongside the evolution of his protean body of work, continuing his longstanding investigation into self-imagery and psychological gender-elasticity. Lukas Samaras was born in Kastoria, Greece, in 1936. In the age of 11, he migrated with his mother in New York in order to meet his father, who was already there. Alone in a foreign country, he observed foreign people with whom he could not communicate, since his English was very poor. This urged him to express himself mostly through painting. He was a natural talent, and this was proven when in 1955 he studied at Rutgers University on a scholarship, where he met Allan Kaprow and George Segal. After graduating, Lucas Samaras was awarded another scholarship for his master in Columbia University, in the field of art history. This was the period when the artist would interact with the New York underground scene. 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. For the artist, the boxes possessed elements of sculpture, architecture, and painting, amplified by the inclusion of objects such as mirrors and photographs—additions that situated Samaras as one of the earliest artists to emphasize his ego and corporeal self in his art. His early boxes led to his inclusion in his first institutional group show, “The Art of Assemblage”, held at MoMA in 1961. In 1965, Samaras joined Pace Gallery, which mounted an exhibition of his works made between 1960 to 1966, that included Samaras’ immersive “Room No. 2” (1966), also known as “Mirrored Room”. A culmination of his mirrored boxes, “Room No. 2” was his first installation to become a part of a museum collection, acquired in 1966 by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. 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). By the mid-1970s, he had also received his first large-scale commission for which he produced “Silent Struggle” (1976), a sculpture comprised of Cor-ten steel, initially installed at the Hale Boggs Federal Courthouse in New Orleans. 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.
Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, Duration: 17/1-22/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com
