LUCAS SAMARAS — iMovies, PaceWildenstein, New York, 2006

PaceWildenstein, New York, 2006. Original exhibition poster, offset lithograph, printed in colour, 71 × 51 cm. Originally folded; now stored unfolded.

Produced for Samaras’s 2006 PaceWildenstein exhibition iMovies, which presented new short films and a 25-channel video installation. The key work, Ecdysiast and Viewers, placed a film of Samaras undressing alongside 24 filmed responses from viewers watching him. The work was later accessioned by MoMA in 2007.

Samaras had long used his own body, face, studio, and domestic space as unstable material. From the early boxes and Polaroid manipulations through performance, photography, film, and digital media, his practice repeatedly turned self-image into a system of distortion, display, and return. iMovies sits at a later point in this trajectory: the artist no longer appears only as subject, but as a recorded event processed through viewers, monitors, software, and gallery promotion.

The poster is not simply an announcement. It is a flattened relay of the exhibition system: artist, audience, gallery, reception date, address, title, image, documentation. The viewer portraits on the left become part of the image economy. The artist appears through his own performance, but also through the administrative design that carries the show into circulation.

A promotional object for a work about looking. A poster that turns viewers into evidence. A gallery support that preserves the exhibition after the installation has disappeared.

Condition: Good vintage condition with visible fold lines, light handling wear, surface creasing, and minor edge and corner wear consistent with storage and circulation. Original period item.