Lucas Samaras

Infobox Artist
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name = Lucas Samaras


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caption = "Self-portrait," "Photo-Transformation," Polaroid SX-70 print, 1973, Getty Museum
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birthdate = 1936
location = Kastoria, Greece
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nationality = American
field = Photography, Sculpture, Printmaking
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Lucas Samaras was born in Kastoria, Greece. He studied at Rutgers University on a scholarship, where he met Allan Kaprow and George Segal. He participated in Kaprow's "Happenings," and posed for Segal's plastic sculptures. [Stiles, p. 290.] Claes Oldenberg, whose Happenings he also participated in, later referred to Samaras as one of the "New Jersey school," which also included Kaprow, Segal, George Brecht, Robert Whitman, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks and Roy Lichtenstein. Samaras previously worked in painting, sculpture, and performance art, before beginning work in photography.ed room environments that contained elements from his own personal history. [Id.] His "Auto-Interviews" were a series of text works that were "self-investigatory" interviews. [See Stiles, p. 349, for "Another Autointerview," 1971.] The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He has worked with multi-media collages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls "Photo-Transformations".

Works by Samaras are included in the collections of numerous public art institutions, including The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, the Courtauld Institute of Art (London), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), the Tate Gallery (London), the Walker Art Center (Minnesota) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City).

Notes

References

*Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, editors. "Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings". University of California Press, 1996.
* Jo Applin, '"Materialized Secrets": Samaras, Hesse and the Small Scale Box', "Object", no. 4, 2002

External links

* [http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=3793&page=1 Getty Museum bio of Lucas Samaras]
* [http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/samaras_lucas.html Artcyclopedia list of Samaras works viewable online]