BOOK: Lucas Samaras-Flowers, Pace Publishing

Since the early 1960s, multimedia artist Lucas Samaras has worked across mediums to advance a Surrealist idiom that departs from the trappings of Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Working in the digital realm long before it was associated with fine art, Samaras pioneered radical new modes of image making throughout his storied career, pushing and redefining the boundaries of portraiture and self-portraiture over the course of seven decades. Centering on the body and the psyche, Samaras’s autobiographical work across photography, painting, installation, assemblage, drawing, textile, and sculpture often meditates on the malleable, shapeshifting nature of selfhood. “I like remaking myself in photography,” the artist once said. Over the decades, his interest in self-representation and object transformation has expanded to include experimentations in photography and―beginning in 1996, when he obtained his first computer―digital art. The volume “Flowers”, conceived and published by Pace Gallery, narrows the scope of Samaras’ oeuvre to focus on his psychedelic digital distortions of flowers. It comprises 110 color images featuring flora of all kinds: in gardens, along sidewalks, in landfills or superimposed onto kaleidoscopic abstract backgrounds. Taken together, these augmented images form an intriguing part of Samaras’ work. -Efi Michalarou