Lucas Samaras
Artist
Biography
Lucas Samaras (1936–2024) was a Greek-born American artist who worked across sculpture, photography, painting, drawing, and digital media. Born in Kastoria, Greece, he emigrated to the United States in 1948 and studied at Rutgers University, taking part in the Happenings movement in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He is best known for his mixed-media boxes, begun in the early 1960s, in which photographs, found objects, pins, mirrors, yarn, and other materials are assembled into intricate, self-contained environments, as well as for his manipulated Polaroid self-portraits, the Photo-Transformations. Across more than seven decades, his work consistently explored the body, the psyche, and the nature of selfhood.