PIRAEUS.- Pace Gallery and The Intermission announced a collaborative survey exhibition of works by Greek-born American artist Lucas Samaras, opening on September 25 at The Intermission’s exhibition space in Piraeus, Greece. This exhibition will mark the first solo presentation of Samaras’s work in his birthplace in twenty years and will bring together works spanning his expansive and protean practice. It will also celebrate a nearly six-decade relationship between the artist and Pace, which has represented him exclusively since 1965.
Born in Kastoria, Greece, in 1936, and immigrating to the United States in 1948, Samaras created a groundbreaking body of work spanning sculpture, photography, painting, digital media, and wearable art. His practice profoundly interrogated selfhood, memory, and transformation, often using his own body as subject—a focus shaped in part by his involvement in the Happenings, a hybrid art form combining installation, performance, and other mediums, staged on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A key figure in the city’s mid-20th-century avant-garde, Samaras embraced this cross-disciplinary context to forge a singular path. In the decades that followed, his work consistently resisted easy categorization as he moved fluidly across figurative pastels, assemblage boxes, immersive mirrored rooms, Polaroid self-portraits, psychedelically colored paintings, and pioneering digital works.
The exhibition at The Intermission will feature works made between the 1960s and the 2010s, including rarely exhibited sculptural jewelry. Examples of Samaras’s manipulated photographs from the late 1960s and early 1970s—the Auto Polaroids and Photo-Transformations—will be on view, alongside a selection of chromatically dense Mosaic Paintings, fabric Reconstructions, and pastel works on paper. A suite of sculptures, including examples from the artist’s Box series and other “transformed” utilitarian objects, will also figure.
The art historian Thomas McEvilley described the course of Samaras’s varied oeuvre “less as a linear sequence than as a concentric series of layers.” He continued: “It is not that his genres have evolved so much as that they have expanded. His oeuvre displays both a relation to changing art historical moments and a sense of the organic, of being a body that grows into itself without ulterior motive.” Despite the many iterations and inventions in his career, Samaras consistently engaged with his own image and psyche. “Some artists reject autobiography and psychology," he said. "I try to keep them with me, no matter how embarrassing they are.”
Three of Samaras’s intricately designed boxes, as well as a 1974 chicken wire box, will feature in Master of the Uncanny. These works, often containing ephemera and photographs, functioned as three-dimensional spaces into which the artist could project himself. His early boxes carried an aggressive edge, evocative of Surrealist objects with blades or pins piercing their surfaces. Over time, however, Samaras shifted from sharp and hostile materials toward softer ones. “I’m always going to be an attacking artist partly because I’m of a different culture and I have to defend what I came with,” he remarked. “But you can threaten people in different ways. You can use color, or glittering stones, or you can offend their Puritan tastes by over-elaboration.”
Around the same time that he began making the boxes, Samaras introduced photography into his practice, initially embedding his images within the sculptural containers. He soon embraced the Polaroid camera, making photography an autonomous medium within his work. Using unconventional poses, camera angles, and colored lighting, and staging scenes within his apartment, he produced a striking body of images. He also began to intervene in the photographs by scratching their surfaces or painting them with ink—initially to correct issues of focus or exposure, and later as a deliberate expressive strategy.
Between 1996 and 1998, Samaras produced a suite of sculptural jewelry, which he made by first modeling and painting chicken wire before casting it in solid 22-karat gold. These wearable artworks—some of which will be included in the exhibition—juxtapose the modest material of wire with the historical weight of gold, combining ornament and constraint in forms that press close to the body. Both visually opulent and physically heavy, they reflect Samaras’s long-time preoccupation with sensation, transformation, and the charged space between object and viewer.
Since his passing in March 2024, Samaras has been the subject of a long-term presentation at Dia Beacon, New York, which opened in September 2024. This exhibition, the last he collaborated on directly, features his Cubes and Trapezoids series—gifted to the institution by the artist in 2013 and presented here for the first time since their 1994 debut at Pace—alongside one of his signature mirrored rooms, Doorway (1966/2007). Earlier this year, 125 Newbury, Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher’s project space in New York City, presented a selection of never-before-seen pastels made by Samaras in the 1960s, shown in dialogue with a suite of figurative bronze sculptures he created in the early 1980s.
Throughout 2025, Pace is celebrating its 65th anniversary year with a series of exhibitions of work by artists who have been central to its program for decades. Presented around the world, these exhibitions are odes to some of the gallery's longest-lasting relationships with artists including Jean Dubuffet, Sam Gilliam, Robert Indiana, Robert Irwin, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Joel Shapiro, Antoni Tàpies, and James Turrell. Over the course of their careers, these figures, with Pace's support, charted new courses in the history of art.
