Lucas Samaras (b. 1936, Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece), the vastly productive sculptor, photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer and performance artist has worked in such diverse materials as Polaroid film, acrylic and oil paint, pastel, aluminium, bronze, clay, fabric, precious metals and stones, razor blades and pins. Across this large variety of media he has mastered to maintain a distinctively characteristic stylistic expression over the past six decades, regardless of contemporaneous artistic tendencies.

In Samaras's work, there is a fusion between art and life, that is represented without veils. Almost all of his artistic career is introspective, autobiographical, and self-referential: from the time of his film 

 (1980), the presence of the artist is the leitmotif of his work. Samaras's self-involvement and eclectic output have made him an unusually elusive figure despite his fame, however, his work was and continues to be vastly influential to artists like Yayoi Kusama, Carl Andre, Franz West, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Since the tumultuous 1960s, when artists as disparate as Warhol and Robert Smithson helped broaden the boundaries of art by challenging its accepted hierarchies, the medium in which an artist chooses to work has seemed less important than what that artist makes of it. But while many artists of the last 50 years, from Robert Rauschenberg to Sherrie Levine, have worked in several mediums during their careers, Samaras is an extreme example of the contemporary tendency to play in many fields of expression at once. The riotous multiplicity of means he uses is not inconsequential, nor is it accidental. ''For Samaras, to be modern means to be hybrid: to recognize that there is no privileged style or medium among the many that constitute the affluence of modern art,'' the American art critic Donald Kuspit wrote in one of three essays found in the catalogue for the 1988 exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, titled 

Lucas Samaras: Objects and Subjects, 1969-1986

Lucas Samaras was born in Kastoria in Greece and immigrated to New Jersey with his family in 1948. He studied under Allan Kaprow at Rutgers University and Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, and became a key figure in the Happenings in New York in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Samaras has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. His work has been represented at three editions of Documenta (1968, 1972, 1977); the Whitney Annual Exhibition (1965, 1968, 1970); and at the 1980 Venice Biennale. He represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Samaras’ work is included in more than forty public collections worldwide, including Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Samaras lives and works in New York.

Lucas Samaras

Peder Lund is proud to announce its third exhibition with the Greek-American artist Lucas Samaras (b. 1936). The vastly productive sculptor, photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer, and performance artist has worked in such diverse materials as Polaroid film, acrylic and oil paint, pastel, aluminum, bronze, clay, fabric, precious metals and stones, razor blades, and pins. Across this large variety of media, he has managed to maintain a distinctively characteristic stylistic expression over the past six decades, regardless of contemporaneous artistic tendencies. The exhibition 

 will feature a suite of nineteen acrylic on canvas works all completed between December 1984 and June 1985. These masterworks, from the artist's series titled 

, have never been shown before, and the exhibition is a product of a direct dialogue with the artist to finally bring these paintings to light. The exhibition opens on September 17th and continues through November 5, 2022.

Work by Lucas Samaras is owned by some of the most respected institutions in the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Gallery, London. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York owns a stunning example from 

 (1985), among over 120 other photographs, paintings, and boxes by the artist. In 2004, the Whitney Museum mounted a major exhibition of the work of Samaras; titled 

The Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras

, the show traced the development of Samaras's self-portrait leitmotif, from the late 1950s to the present. The exhibition was the first in an American museum in fifteen years, and the first major consideration of the artist's oeuvre in New York since 1972. The Metropolitan Museum, New York, has a particularly substantial holding of the artist's work and mounted a major exhibition of their collection in 2014.

Samaras has been the subject of numerous other solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. His work has been represented at three editions of Documenta (1968, 1972, 1977); the Whitney Annual Exhibition (1965, 1968, 1970); and at the 1980 Venice Biennale. He represented Greece at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Samaras lives and works in New York.

Works