Lucas Samaras

Born in Kastoria in 1936, in 1948 Samaras emigrated with his family to the United States. He attended Rutgers University, New Jersey, studying under Allan Kaprow and George Segal. In 1959 the artist had his first solo exhibition at Reuben Gallery in New York and attended Meyer Schapiro’s art-history lectures at Columbia University. He participated in Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg’s Happenings. In 1960 he joined the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York and in 1964 moved to New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1965 he began his lifelong association with Pace Gallery. He received major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1969), and at the Kunstverein, Hanover (1970). In 1971 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, organized a retrospective of his "Boxes", and in 1972 the Whitney Museum of American Art staged his first major retrospective. Kim Levin’s monograph on the artist appeared in 1975. He visited Greece in 1977, 1978, and 1983. In 2005 the artist was the subject of a retrospective at the National Gallery in Athens. In 2009 Samaras represented Greece at the Venice Biennale. A groundbreaking, genre-defying artist of the later twentieth century, Samaras worked across media—painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, environments, film, jewelry, and digital art—creating autobiographical works that probe potential transformations of the human body and the world of everyday objects. He died in New York in 2024.