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 has the pleasure of welcoming you to the exhibition 

. The exhibition shows a selection of central works from Samaras’ Polaroids from the 1970s in which Samaras himself is the subject matter, photographed in his studio and home.

Samaras began using a Polaroid 360 camera in 1969, which gave rise to the series 

. In 1973, the Polaroid Corporation gave him an SX-70 camera, which he used in his subsequent exploration of the medium, during which he further manipulated his motifs. Such manipulation is especially pronounced in the series 

Despite the artist’s central standing, consolidated by many purchases by and exhibitions at major museums around the world, the work of Lucas Samaras has never before been shown in Norway. The exhibition at Peder Lund therefore provides a unique insight into Samaras’ art, hitherto inaccessible to the Norwegian public.

Lucas Samaras’ photographic self-portraits made use of, what was at the time, the new Polaroid technique, which appealed to him both for its intimacy – it is highly suitable for private, self-reflective images in a domestic setting – and for its chemical properties. The chemical properties enable him to speedily develop a picture that can be manipulated and embellished with a painterly quality before the photosensitive material hardens and is fixed. The resulting self-portraits are narcissistic, in that they offer the artist the possibility to view the results of his grimaces and posturings almost immediately. The new technique is so rapid that it can be compared with grooming oneself in front of a mirror. In this sense, these are captured mirror images. No less significant is it that these pictures were produced in a context in which performance art, with its interest in boundaries and its explorations with body language, was crucial to the neo- avant-garde’s activities. Exploration of the artist’s own body and facial expressions did in addition become an important theme in the new medium of video art in the late 1960s. Parallels to Samaras’ performative self-portraits are found in contemporary video works by artists such as Robert Morris, Hannah Wilke, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nau- man and Dan Graham, to name but a few of the most important.

Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras

 was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the exhibition “Lucas Samaras” at the National Museum in Athens in 2005. In 2009 a solo exhibition with Samaras’ art was shown at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

Samaras’ works have been purchased by major institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Works