Lucas Samaras, the Greek-American artist known for his sculptures of densely decorated boxes, has died aged 87, Pace Gallery announced.
Born in Kastoria, Greece in 1936, Samaras immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 12. He studied fine arts under artists Allan Kaprow and George Segal at Rutgers University in New Jersey from 1955 to 1959, after which Samaras attended Columbia University in New York, studying art history under Meyer Schapiro.
Emerging in New York’s art scene from 1959 on, Samaras was interested in boxes, which often functioned as self-portraits. For his first solo exhibition at Green Gallery, New York, he showed a series of assemblage boxes – spatially complicated by mirrors, photographs and personal enfermeras. The interest culminated in the creation of his immersive installation Room No. 2 – in which a gallery room was covered in mirrors that resulted in a disorienting sense of ever expanding space – first installed at Pace Gallery which he joined in 1965. In 1969, Samaras started to experiment with Polaroids and created distorted images by interfering with the process of instant imaging. These interests in self-portraiture and meddling with photographic images continued in his later works with digital photography (Photoifctions, 2003). ‘I like remaking myself in photography,’ the artist once said.
Samaras’s work can be found in major museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dia ArtFoundation, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and the Iwaki City Art Museum, Japan.
