Lucas Samaras: ALBUM 2

ALBUM 2 is the official companion app for a new exhibition of work by Lucas Samaras featuring over 700 photographs and a mirrored room installation. The app contains all the images from the exhibition, plus a new text by the artist.

The exhibition will be on view from May 2 to June 27, 2015, at Pace Gallery (510 West 25th Street, New York, NY).

Samaras continues his exploration of manipulated images and identity with 720 digitally altered images that will sit on a shelf lining the longest lengths of the gallery. Comprised mostly of self-portraits, the photographs reflect the artist’s unrelenting self-inquiry. Among the recent self-portraits, Samaras has interspersed personal family photographs with childhood images of himself, transforming the project into a personal archive and a biographical inquiry.

The manipulations of the photographs refer back to the rainbow-tinged Auto-Polaroids Samaras began in the 1960s and his Photo-Transformations of the 1970s. Using a range of techniques from filters to mirroring and doubling, Samaras’s manipulations form visual metaphors for the psychological probing and self-investigation that appears throughout the artist’s oeuvre. The filters and changes that characterize this massive body of images also refer to his proto-Photoshop works of the 1980s and digital videos in the 2000s, constituting something of an archive of previous techniques.

Lucas Samaras (b. 1936 Kastoria, Greece) has produced work in all varieties of media over his five-decade career, often working with his own image. A student of Allan Kaprow, Samaras was a key figure in the Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s collaborating with Robert Whitman and participating in Kaprow’s seminal 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in 1959. Samaras went on to be an early vanguard in assemblage, Polaroid film, and digitally manipulated photography. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions including The Art of Assemblage, The Museum of Modern Art (1961); three editions of Documenta (1968, 1972, 1977); the Whitney Annual (1965, 1968, 1970); and the 1980 Venice Biennale. He represented Greece in the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Samaras has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1971); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1972–73, 2003–04); Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989–90, 2014); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1975, 1992); and International Center of Photography (2008). In both 1981 and 1989, the Denver Museum of Art organized traveling exhibitions of his work; the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation, Athens, organized a retrospective of Samaras’ work at the National Gallery of Greece, which was his first solo exhibition in his country of birth. A 1983 exhibition of his Polaroid photographs organized by the Polaroid International Collection traveled to twelve venues over three years including the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; and Serpentine Gallery, London.

Samaras’s work is included in more than forty public collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago; Dia Art Foundation, New York, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Samaras lives and works in New York. This is his thirty-fifth exhibition at the gallery since he joined Pace in 1966.