LUCAS SAMARAS

     Self-portrait with a Polaroid 360, when the artist was young:    

 

Lucas Samaras was born in 1936, in Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece.  Eliding historical Categorization, Lucas Samaras’s oeuvre is united through its consistent form on the body and psyche often emphasizing autobiography.

 

The theme of self-deception and identity has been a driving force behind his practice, a grower which at its inset in the early 1960s advanced the Surrealistic idiom, yet proposed a radical departure from the presiding themes from Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

 

Samaras emigrated with his family from Greece to the US in 1948, settling in West New York, New Jersey.  He attended Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, studying under Allen Kundru and George Segal, and then at Columbia University, New York where he studied History of Art under Meyer Shapiro.  His interest and self-investigation began during this period, where he initiated painting self-portraits from the front and the back using mirrors.

 

He also gravitated in using pastels, which enabled him to work quickly, exploring figurative and geometrical forms, in rich colours and luxuriant texture characteristics that would revive through his work.  He soon shifted towards objects producing assemblage reliefs and boxes composed of elements culled from his immediate surroundings and five-and-dime stores, cutlery, nails, mirrors, brightly coloured yarn and feathers affixed with liquid aluminium plaster.   

 

His first New York exhibition was at the Reuben Gallery in 1959 which came in the heels of his first group show at the Gallery, Kaprow’s 18 Happening in 6 parts.  Through his involvement at the Ruben Gallery and his participation in Happenings, Samaras met Jim Dine, Red Grower and Claes Oldenburg.  He had met Robert Wittman, another key figure in the Happenings Movement, while at Rutgers and the 2 collaborated on performances.  Samaras debated his assemblage boxes in 1961 at Green Gallery, New York.   For the artist, the boxes possessed elements of sculpture, architecture and painting amplified by the inclusion of objects such as mirrors and photograph-additions that situated Samaras as one of the excellent artists to emphasize his ego and corporal self in oil. 

 

His early boxes led to his inclusion in his first institutional group show. The Art of Assemblage was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1961.   

 

In 1969, Samaras began to expand upon his use of photography experimentation with a Polaroid 360 camera which appeared to his senses of immediacy.  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 “Protofiction” (2003) a series characterized by self-portraits and psychedelic compositions.

 Gesturing forward larger investigations of self-reflection in his work found in his mirror rooms, self-portraiture, and the use of digital mirror-imaging. Samaras’s oeuvre acts as an extent of his body while underscoring the transforming possibilities of every day – a true blur in art and life. 

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