Lucas Samaras, Artist Whose Unclassifiable Works Evoked Strange Psychologies, Dies at 87

Lucas Samaras, an artist whose work in many mediums channeled alternate psychological states, has died at 87. His longtime gallery Pace, which mounted 30 exhibitions of his work, said he died on Thursday.

Since the 1960s, Samaras has been a beloved figure in New York for artworks that have never conformed to any specific movement. He produced unclassifiable sculptures, photographs, digital artworks, and more, and he always seemed to function according to his own wavelength. “To a certain extent,” he once said, “I’m an outsider.”

So disparate were his many bodies of work that he seemed to elude critics, even as they heaped praise upon them. “There appears to be not one Lucas Samaras, but several artists of that name,” remarked the New York Times’s Grace Glueck in 1996.

The sculptures which first brought Samaras fame during the ’60s took the form of ready-made objects that he augmented with pins, razors, and shards. The most famous of these are his “Boxes” of the early ’60s, a grouping of lidded containers that seem to beg viewers to open and close them while also warding off any curious handlers. Art historian Donald Kuspit once labeled these works “wombs with much evil and violence in them, and no hope at the bottom, except for Samaras’s mirror image.”

But by the end of his career, Samaras had veered in many different directions. He created walk-in installations that were covered in reflective surfaces. He shot pictures that he manipulated using both analog and digital means. He even produced a series of NFTs.

In many works, Samaras enlisted his own body, repeatedly shooting Polaroid pictures of himself in poses that were sometimes erotically charged. He seemed unusually interested in images of himself, leading some to suggest his work about narcissism and other self-reflective mindsets—an interpretation compounded by the fact that Samaras had a habit of interviewing himself.

“He is an intrepid self-investigator and he has made a career out of mutating his own image and likeness,” Interview magazine once wrote.

Samaras died just months before a series of sculptures from the 1990s were to go on view at Dia Beacon in Upstate New York this September. His decorated CV includes four appearances in Documenta, the famed exhibition that occurs once every five years in Kassel, Germany, and the Greek Pavilion for the 2009 Venice Biennale.

A full obituary will follow.