Collection: Lucas Samaras

Lucas Samaras (b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece; d. 2024, New York) worked across sculpture, painting, photography, performance, and video over six decades, consistently using his own body, face, and domestic environment as unstable material. His early boxes and assemblages, made from pins, mirrors, and found objects, established an aesthetic of surface disturbance and psychological charge that would persist across every medium he subsequently entered.

From the 1960s Polaroid manipulations — in which he physically altered the emulsion of self-portrait photographs while still wet — through large-scale pastel works, digital prints, and late video installations, Samaras repeatedly turned self-image into a system of distortion, display, and return. The body was never simply depicted; it was processed, multiplied, fragmented, and recomposed.

Items in this section include exhibition posters, catalogues, invitation cards, and other printed matter produced in relation to Samaras’s exhibitions at PaceWildenstein, New York, and other institutions. These objects record the administrative and promotional surfaces through which his work entered public circulation.