Lucas Samaras

Already an established artist when he began his iconic photography experiments in 1969, Greek-born Lucas Samaras created drawings, design objects, paintings, photographs, sculpture and installations using a variety of materials. In the late 1960s Samaras began to explore photography using Polaroid cameras, creating vibrant self portraits. Smearing, smudging and sometimes puncturing the wet emulsion fluid, Samaras altered the images in his Photo-Transformations series (1973-76) to produce otherworldly and psychological pictures. 

Throughout the course of his career Samaras’ has had more than one-hundred solo exhibitions and seven career retrospectives, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, International Center of Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Denver Art Museum, Denver, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Samaras received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1959 and in 2009 he represented Greece in the 53rd Venice Biennale.