Lucas Samaras (b. 1936)
Born in Kastoria, Macedonia, in Greece, Lucas Samaras immigrated to the United States as a teenager. He studied at Rutgers University with George Segal and Alan Kaprow, and participated in Kaprow’s Happenings.
Samaras began working in assemblage in his twenties, transforming ordinary objects with complex ornament. His work was recognized early; he was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Art of the Assemblage” in 1961. At that time, mid-size boxes came to dominate Samaras’ serial constructions, serving as ground and frame for his uncanny collection and arrangement of objects. He has explored the peculiar shape of the box—three-dimensional and flat, intimate and exposed, alluring and threatening—throughout his career. He explains the appeal of the theme: “We live in boxes, see and eat with boxes, travel in boxes. . . . Box is a lovely principle that carries a lot of symbolic beans.”
Frequently encrusted with glittering ornament, Samaras’ boxes have an immediate tactile appeal. But the invitation to touch is thwarted by the materials he chooses: pins, razors, and tacks are simultaneously brilliant and dangerous. Samaras also employs yarn, pencils, mirrors, and—in keeping with an oeuvre that is consistently self-referential—photographs of himself. The boxes become like reliquaries in which the objects possess a talismanic power for the artist.
During his prolific career, Samaras has also explored self-representation and investigated his own private psychic realm in his Auto-Polaroids and Photo-Transformations, reconstructed room environments, and paintings of violence and chaos, among other projects. He has exhibited widely and frequently and was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003.
© Copyright 2008 Hollis Taggart Galleries